Few “Toyota Way” on a Web Project

Yesterday, after transferring the code for a certain section of the site from a server to another, the code breaks. Checking the output result, an extension is needed to have the code working properly and so I need to revert back the old codes which version control helps a lot! This should have been avoided if done correctly the first time when the system was planned.

Anyway, what is the “Toyota Way” have to do with these!?…basically, “Toyota Way” is a good example of a reliable self improvement process that eliminate waste, solve problem at root cause and always about efficiency to make a company successful and in these posted case…a web project. Try googling or searching the net, “Toyota Way”, and this will give you an idea about how efficiency and productivity is done in a manufacturing environment.

So, how can we improve a bit by applying a few “Toyota Way” of improving the system?

1. Identify Problem, waste or causes(Kaizen)
- Development server should always be a replica of the Production Server to easily reproduce bugs and fix immediately. In our case, production server is totally different from another production server and development sandbox as well which makes debugging chaotic that even a simple “index” error on pages are suppressed just to hide errors instead of fixing them.

- Over processing and multitasking because reading all the codes without any single API present or published considering the project is almost 4 years and running that is only based on PHP and MSSQL!

- Kaizen what???,basically it all boils down on how we proactive to see waste/problems, solving it and further improving  the process being implemented. In our case, how do we often apply patches? how do we often break things before hand(testing) and fixing it before our boss or the demanding user see it? Should we used unit testing?

2. Standards, a must!
- Having standards create repeatable method that is predictable, high productive and of course, high quality. In our case again,  the web project.
Be it creating “Coding Standard”, using Version Control and even using standard development practices e.g. architecture, libraries, reusable components and unit testing.

3. Always have an accountable Team Member/s
- Productive team member is one of the key player in web projects implementation and on-going code improvement. Each should be diverse and capable of solving wide range of web related problems from site usability to hard-to-find bugs.

There are lot of stuff that can be followed by using the “Toyota Way”, this humble post is too specific on what I’m into right now. By looking or finding references on the net would give you more ideas and keep your existing processes improving over time.