Venkatesh Krishnamurthy
I had my first opportunity to practice LeSS in 2006. While I was with Valtech in Bangalore, Craig Larman, who was, the chief scientist was already in the process of forming LeSS ideas.
Being a Scrum Master at that time, I had the opportunity to work with Craig closely and watch him implement some of the LeSS principles, tech practices and structuring the organization to be nimble.
Being a computer scientist, I got impressed with the technical practices and started making my hands dirty in integrating various tools, rolling out configuration management practices and setting up continuous delivery/integration and deployment environments. I was able to capture some of these experiences in an article I published in 2006 for Agile Journal. This is accessible here. It was aptly titled, "Tools integration in distributed environment".
Another pet project that I worked with Craig Larman was building something called "Virtual Lava Lamp".
Virtual Lava Lamp
As one could see from the screen shot above, the Lava Lamp was integrated with the Continuous integration environment(Cruise Control + SV) and build results used to trigger this lava lamp. Green indicates all good and red used to encourage the developers to fix the build. Craig and I built this on a simple X386 machine, which was super low cost.
All the good technical practices are covered as part of LeSS framework and under the Technical Excellence subsection as shown below:
