Continuous improvement

- One of the things that I love about the HP LaserJet Firmware case study, is the fact that they independently invented continuous delivery. They didn't read the continuous delivery book, because it wasn't out yet. They didn't decide to implement that particular solution, they just solved the problem they were having, tried to keep geting better at what they were doing, and continuous delivery emerged as an outcome of doing that. They also independently involved a problem-solving method that we're going to be talking about in a few places in this course. It's called the Improvement Kata. The Improvement Kata, as described by Mike Rother in his book Toyota Kata, is a systematic, scientific, method for problem-solving in pursuit of a measurable objective. The idea with the Improvement Kata is that improvement becomes habitual. A Kata in Japanese martial arts is a practice that you repeat over and over again until it becomes habitual. It's like in music, practicing your scales. Or in…