Lean Software Development

The term 'lean' … describes any efficient management practice that minimized waste, including in product development … In lean terms, 'waste' is anything that doesn't either add customer value directly or add knowledge about how to deliver that value more effectively.

'Lean' fundamentally refers an approach in the manufacturing world that was originally developed by Toyota in the 1950's. At this time Japanese industry was recovering from the ravages of the second world war. This approach, often called the Toyota Production System is mostly credited to Taiichi Ohno, although he was influenced by various western thinkers - particularly Deming. The Toyota Production System became well known in the rest of the world in the 1990's when westerners started writing books to explain why the Japanese were beating the US at so many his approach Lean Manufacturing.

Lean practices use the principle of Little's law to improve the flow of value to the end user by eliminating sources of waste from a software development process. Little's law defines throughput as a ratio of work in process and cycle time. Increasing throughput (or productivity) requires continuously improving (that is, decreasing) cycle time while ensuring that the work-in-process limit doesn't exceed the capacity available to process the work.

Internet scale, the increasing rate of technology evolution, and the broad adoption of lean and agile methods have triggered a profound change in not only application and infrastructure architectures but also the software architect's roles and responsibilities.

Building on lean and agile practices, DevOps means end-to-end automation in software development and delivery. Hardly anybody will be able to approach it with a cookbook-style approach, but most developers will benefit from better connecting the previously isolated silos of development and operations. Many DevOps tools exist that can help them do this.

Inspired by general ideas about how the automotive industry brings innovation into lean manufacturing, the author proposes introducing an activity called software sketchifying into software product development. Sketchifying aims to stimulate software stakeholders to spend more time generating and considering alternative ideas before making a decision to proceed with engineering.

A close look at the evidence underpinning the original concept of lean production and its popular interpretation reveals the inherent challenges of measuring and interpreting evidence for performance differences.

I get uncontrollable giggles when people tell me their organizations are 'lean and mean.' They say it in the most ponderous tones. They wrinkle their brows earnestly and look me right in the eye. 'We're lean and mean here,' they say. They say this even though they themselves are overweight and rather sweet. And that's only the first of the contradictions.