IMPLEMENTING LEAN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT, by Mary and Tom Poppendieck

This is a GREAT book!

I appreciated LEAN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT, AN AGILE TOOLKIT so much a I had to read the next sequel.

I was glad to have read the first sequel before the second, as the second assumes the first is read and understood, and as there is no duplication between the sequels.

Reading this book wasn't pure pleasure. Indeed, it helped me realize the extend of improvement to perform in my organization. The waste and suboptimization is revealed and is now difficult to tolerate. This should be encouraging, but the book reveals some improvements are way out of control of a development team. It implies the full value stream. This is where the book may become quite discouraging: can you extend the improvements out of the development team? In a big corporate company, this can be more than a challenge...

Among many other things:

I learned that defects waiting in a list are waste, as they are unfinished work and hide other potential bugs.

I really enjoyed the part saying that tests are there to prevent bugs, not find them.

I understood that our practice of design by contract with assertions was a great way to implement the "stop-the-line" culture and to build mistake-proof code.

I learned A LOT on the use of slack to speed-up the time inside a process.

I recognized what I experienced through a CMMi certification.

I RECOMMEND THIS BOOK.