Press releases

Lean from the Trenches--New from Pragmatic Bookshelf: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban

Raleigh, NC—You know the Agile and Lean development buzzwords, you've read the books. But when systems need a serious overhaul, you need to see how to apply agile and lean techniques in real life, with real situations and people.

In Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban (Pragmatic Bookshelf, $30.00 USD), agile coach and consultant Henrik Kniberg shares how the Swedish police combined XP, Scrum, and Kanban in a 60-person project. From start to finish, you'll see how you, too, can deliver a successful product using Lean principles. And yes, this particular large, difficult project was a great success.

Henrik says, "The system was rolled out nationwide in April 2011 and garnered quite a lot of media attention. The product has been featured in major newspapers, on TV, and on the radio, and so far the response has been very positive." No smoke or mirrors here; this is the real thing.

Every key point is illustrated with a photo or diagram, and anecdotes bring you inside the project as you discover why and how one organization modernized its workplace in record time.

You'll see how they started with an organization in desperate need of a new way of doing things, and finished with cross-functional teams all working in sync to develop a scalable, complex system while continuously improving their development process.

You'll walk through the project step by step, from customer engagement to the daily "cocktail party," to testing, cross-team synchronization, and version control. In this honest look at what works—and what doesn't—you'll find out how to:

• Make quality everyone's business, not just the testers.
• Keep everyone moving in the same direction without micromanagement.
• Use simple and powerful metrics to aid in planning and process improvement.
• Balance between low-level feature focus and high-level system focus.

You'll be ready to jump into the trenches and streamline your own development process.

Available in epub, mobi, and PDF direct from the publisher and in paperback from fine bookstores worldwide.

What People are Saying

I read the whole thing end to end. In a word, FANTASTIC! Grounded, real, funny, easy to read, smooth flow, good balance between theory and practice.
—Kent Beck

Awesome. Kudos to you for documenting the everyday sort of decision making that has to happen for a big project to be successful. I hope it becomes a benchmark against which many more projects are judged.
—Ward Cunningham

FANTASTIC! I know it’s going to make a big dent in the world of software development. It’s easily the most important book I have seen in the past year!
—Mary Poppendieck, Author of the Lean Software Development series