One Bonsai: Cultivating Software Productivity

One Bonsai is a philosophy for maximizing software development productivity. One Bonsai is a collection of principles and practices that will help you maximize your team’s potential to produce effective software. You can help create the best software, as quickly as possible, while maintaining joy, passion and inspiration using Bonsai.

Influences and Prior Art

One Bonsai was developed through many years of practical experience with Agile Software methodologies in sole proprietorships, small startups, some of the largest companies in the world and everything in between. The Bonsai methodology is informed by all of the agile methodologies that came before and can be adapted to any existing methodology that you want to use: Scrum, Kanban, Lean, eXtreme Programming, or any other. Feel free to study all of these methods and spend decades practicing them and understanding their strengths and weaknesses in different contexts. Or, almost as good, read this book, and the synthesis of principles that it represents, and receive a concise view of what makes a software team agile.

The Goal of All Agile Software Process

When working to develop a productive process for your team, it’s important to first zoom out and understand what you want to achieve by following a process. The process should seek to ensure that:

Every engineer is working with motivation and passion on the one most important thing that they can confidently deliver in a timely manner.