13 articles
← Back to all tagsThe fundamental Lean principle that a defect costs exponentially more as it progresses through the value chain applies with particular acuity to software development.
Kanban, born at Toyota in the 1950s under the impetus of Taiichi Ohno, was not a visualization tool but a signal: literally a card or label that authorized production.
Pull flow and one-piece flow are two fundamental Lean concepts often confused or used interchangeably.
The Toyota Production System identifies three sources of dysfunction, often referred to by their Japanese names: muda (waste), muri (overburden) and mura (unevenness).
The Japanese term dandotsu refers to a superiority so overwhelming that comparison loses its meaning. Where kaizen advocates continuous improvement through small steps, dandotsu sets a different ambit...
In Toyota factories, a cord runs along every production line[^1]. Any worker can pull it to signal a problem and, if necessary, stop the entire chain. This device, called the andon cord, embodies a co...
Seiton, the second pillar of 5S, literally means "to arrange" or "to put in order." In Toyota factories, this principle translates to a simple rule: every tool must be within arm's reach of the operat...
In 1982, criminologists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling formulated a simple hypothesis: a broken window left unrepaired signals that no one is watching, inviting further degradation[^1]. What st...
"Always leave the campground cleaner than you found it." This scout principle, transposed to software development by Robert C. Martin, has become one of the most cited precepts in clean code culture. ...
The scientific method rests on a simple principle: an idea has value only if it survives confrontation with reality. Formulate a hypothesis, design an experiment to test it, observe the results, adjus...
Pull requests emerged in a very particular context: that of open source on the Internet, where strangers propose modifications to projects maintained by other strangers.
Trunk-Based Development (TBD) takes the logic of continuous flow to its conclusion: all developers commit directly to a single branch (trunk or main), multiple times per day, without long-lived featur...
Continuous Delivery is too often relegated to a "technical issue for the dev team." This classification is a strategic mistake. Reducing lead time (the delay between an idea and its deployment to prod...