Title: Managing the Design Factory Author: Donald Reinertsen Length: 288 pages Published: 1997 ISBN-10: 0684839911 ISBN-13: 9780684839912 This book analyzes product development processes from a lean perspective. The author starts by introducing the concept of a “design factory”, which shows the differences between lean principles applied to manufacturing and lean principles applied to creating new [...]
This is an idea that I read about in Managing the Design Factory (detailed outline). Around page 226, Reinertsen says: Let us start with the first source of technical risk, the high-risk subsystem. Which subsystems have high technical risk? To assess this we must perform our project-level analysis to determine how each program objective (expense, [...]
On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. — Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club In the long run, every signal dies. Paper rots, genes mutate, forests burn, files corrupt. Error correcting codes help, but they aren’t enough. Perfect preservation of effort is not the way of the universe. Human languages [...]
My friend Tyson works at a major insurance company. Recently he shared with me a technique that he uses there: He keeps a work journal to write down domain-specific things that he learns. Journaling could include writing down a technique or rule of thumb used, a page of a book that was helpful in a [...]
I’ve noticed that when developers have worked on a project and then someone else takes it over, they seem to feel guilty about decisions made on the project. When I ask them why certain decisions were made, they might sheepishly say, “Yeah… I know it’s not the best way to do this, and it’s not [...]
If you absolutely must complain, I have found an interesting, and perhaps socially acceptable, way to do this. There are a few concepts that separate my method from ordinary complaining. Pecha Kucha Pecha Kucha is a challenging presentation format where presenters have twenty slides shown for twenty seconds each. Presenters are forced to practice and [...]
I was wondering what people’s standards for using tags in comments like TODO, FIXME, HACK, XXX, and the like were. // TODO: implement the foo module here … // HACK here be dragons … // XXX … /* FIXME: late at night, I need some sleep */ … One advantage of using these tags is [...]
