September 7th (Wednesday) Session: Jidoka in Software Development

Hey another session with a weird foreign name (not that there is anything wrong with weird foreign names).

September's AgileScotland meeting will be presented by Dr Kevin Rutherford on Wednesday 7th of September in the usual place (Currie and Brown). Kevin will run a "think tank" Jidoka session. The session will be valuable for anyone who wants to improve their software development process - developers and managers; apprentices, journeymen and experts.

Lean manufacturing is based on two pillars: Pull and Jidoka. Agile methods focus most of their attention only on Pull: customers pull features or user stories from the development team, and the development team carries out every task just in time and without building up inventory. Jidoka – the policy of stopping the production line whenever a fault occurs, and then fixing both the fault and the cause of the fault – has been largely forgotten. But Jidoka is what keeps value flowing fast through the process, iteration after iteration. And yet there are no published studies or collections of Jidoka practices.

In this think-tank the participants will work together to describe, discuss and discover “jidoka moments” - points at which software development projects are, could be or should be stopped in order to prevent faults passing downstream.

Dr Kevin Rutherford is a Chartered Engineer with over twenty years' experience in all aspects of software development. He has spent the last ten years coaching software teams in the adoption of iterative and agile processes. He is a member of the Agile Alliance and a signatory to the Agile Manifesto, and chairs the UK's AgileNorth group. He presents regularly at conferences, notably XP2000.