Throughput Accounting

Accounting has different problem solving schools of thought just like software development does.

If you want to measure the effectiveness of a management decision you want to count the costs and benefits of that decision. The traditional way to do this is with Cost Accounting. In the Lean-Thinking approach, Cost accounting blamed for guiding companies toward inefficiencies.

Instead an approach called: Throughput Accounting, measures end-to-end benefits on a system wide basis.

One difference is that with Cost Accounting inventory is valued as a good thing - an asset. The more inventory you have on the books the more your company is worth (on paper anyway).

Using Throughput accounting, Value is only recorded when a product is actually sold. The piles of out of date parts carried in inventory are seen as a liability. The more incomplete work you've got in the process the lower your value (on paper).

Thoughput accounting seems to me to reflect the real word a bit better. Your company sells a product, you record value. Not before.

But there seems to be a struggle in the accounting community between these two camps. Partly, because they are advising management to take different paths toward success.

It reminds me of the struggle between the Data Processing and the Object Oriented approaches to software development. More on that later.

Lean Software Strategies

I just got a Lean Case study published in chapter 25 of
Lean Software Strategies: Proven Techniques for Managers and Developers .




And for a Recap of Lean Software Development see this previous posting.

The Rails Day-After

Well, I didn't give as many "updates from the front" as I intended. But here is my rapid-review of the day of coding.

Wow !

Ok, now more detail...

It was the quickest 18 hour period that I've experienced in a long time. Everything I looked at the clock it jumped another 2 hours. Among the 6 coders we all seemed to feel that way. After an 8 hour day at work we usually feel tired out. After 17 hours in the contest and at 1:00 am, we were all still wishing we had another hour or two, to squeeze a little more functionality in before the deadline. I did not see one single yawn the entire time. As the evening was getting late, we inadvertently missed dinner entirely. We did have plenty of snacks to keep us going.

The Contest

About 120 teams were signed up. 100 competed. This contest was world-wide. More details at railsday.com

The Application

It was a very good start on the app. It was usable and functional. The PhotoDepo sets up user accounts for Photographers, Guests, and Administrators. Photographers can upload Photo's, arrange them into albums and add "tag words" to them. Guests can browse and search the photos by the "tag words". Administrators set up and manage the accounts. And other users can browse without signing on to the application.
We do wish we had another few hours to add some of the cool AJAX features and polish it up a bit more.

Lines Of Code Produced

App Code	445 (not counting the rhtml)
Test Code	524
Total Code	969

That's about 20 lines of code per person per hour

More Railsday Review's

Scott's Review and Jims's Review

RailsDay Milestones

The two programming teams in Cincinnati are Team8 and Team32.
Team8 is doing a food tracking system.
Team32 is doing a photoDepo

The contest rules require at least 12 check-ins.
At this point Team34 has 16 check-ins and Team8 has 32.

Today is Rails Day

Rails day has started. If you would like to check how it's going ask me at AOL Instant Messager Nickname: objwind

Also available for video iChat with Apple iSight.

Show Time !

Tommorow is the first www.RailsDay.com.
A 24-hour contest to code an interesting web application.
Cincinnati has 2 teams entered, and we will be coding in public at the Kenwood towers
The Towers of Kenwood
8044 Montgomery Rd.
Cincinnati, OH

Directions and organizational information are available at:
Rails Day Planning

Stop by and visit the coders in action.