Category Archives: Uncategorized

basic principles; starting with kanban

David J Anderson is interviewed by geekwire: How an automotive secret can make for better software.


Agile methods for software development and project management …. are based on a few basic principles: it’s better to make progress with imperfect information and revise later than to wait for better quality information; it’s worthwhile to drive for high quality initially than to drive quality through quality assurance testing and rework late in the cycle; there is a dividend for encouraging a high level of trust and reducing negotiation, contracts, audit and arbitration in working relationships; and knowledge work such as software development is perishable so you should seek to reduce delays and focus on short delivery cycles.

All of these ideas are worthy and useful. Kanban also encourages these. However, it does so in a non-prescriptive, emergent way. Kanban is something you apply to an existing process to catalyze suggestions for improvement and to control variability that adversely affects predictability. The principles of Kanban are: start with the process you use now; agree to pursue incremental evolutionary change (rather than a dramatic change to a new (perhaps Agile) process); initially, respect all current roles, responsibilities and job titles.

(emphasis mine)

what is kanban, and why should you care about it?

David J Anderson is interviewed by geekwire: How an automotive secret can make for better software.

Kanban is a way of visualizing invisible knowledge work activities such as software development, and limiting the quantity of work in progress. Limiting work-in-progress has several benefits: by avoiding over-burdening, quality is often significantly higher, while workers are happier and better motivated; delivery times are usually significantly shorter and far more predictable; priorities are often clear and prioritization decisions are simplified.


Kanban is also helping organizations improve their methods of working in an incremental, evolutionary fashion with reduced resistance to change and adopting new ways of working and collaborating together. Most managers appreciate that resistance to change is a major impediment to improving the economic performance of their business. Kanban is addressing this problem.

(emphasis mine)

Testing Email Notifications with Apache James 3.0

Enter Apache James. Not long ago I came across this wonderful blog posting below about using Apache James 2.x in order to test application email notifications:

livingtao.blogspot.com/2007/05/testing-application-generated-emails.html

IT is amazing to see that this is pretty much the only dedicated blog posting on the internet regarding a seemingly very common issue. You would think that almost every serious enterprise application has to sent out email notifications, and be it solely for the “forgot password” feature
….
Anyway, the steps illustrated in the blog above also work nicely for James 3.0
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Here are the simple steps to get things set up for Apache James 3.0: