ND8 DEVELOPMENT
Best Practice Software Development
© ND8
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Lean
Mary & Tom Poppendieck’s book, Lean Software Development, took the principles of Lean Production, pioneered by Toyota and popularised through James Womack’s, The Machine That Changed the World, and applied them to the field of software development.
The term Lean Production was coined by IMVP researcher John Krafcik because “it uses less of everything compared to with mass production - half the human effort, half the manufacturing space, half the investment in tools, half the effort to develop a new product in half the time and requires half the inventory” (The Machine That Changed the World, 1990).
Lean principles, including eliminating waste, delivering fast, concurrent development, amplifying learning and deciding as late as possible, underpin the Agile development movement, but more that that Lean is a way of thinking, an attitude, a set of guiding principles, rather than a method or technique in itself, and its potential application extends beyond the software development process to the wider IT function.
As Lean’s influence continues to grow, and it undoubtedly will, it will be become the major success factor in the software development industry. Put in other terms, who would you rather be right now, Toyota or General Motors. Ignore Lean at your peril!
I bought Mary and Tom Poppendieck’s book only a couple of years ago, and ended up reading it in a single sitting, immediately followed by The Machine That Changed The World, and soaked it up.
Lean seemed magic stuff. It both fitted with what we’d been doing, explained it, shook it up, and threw it forward.
Since then Lean thinking has been at the heart of everything we do. Whether it’s Agile, or RUP, or straight requirements analysis, or auditing IT suppliers and delivery teams, or recommending improvements to our customers’ development functions, or running retrospectives, lean thinking is central to it all.
Though we can claim only two years experience of Lean, once you get it, once you start to see waste everywhere and understand concepts like options thinking, it soon snowballs.
If you engage with us, whether it’s to run a programme, or project, or provide agile consultancy, or help improve you’re development capability, you’ll get lean for free (whether you like it, or know it, or not!)