It’s become increasingly popular to combine Agile practices with Lean principles as described in Mary and Tom Poppendieck’s work on Lean Software Development.
In Lean there are seven Lean Principles:
- Eliminating Waste
- Amplifying Learning
- Decide as Late as Possible
- Deliver as Fast as Possible
- Empower the Team
- Build Integrity In
- See the Whole
Taking a lean approach focuses on avoiding unnecessary features (which, for Lean, are a good example of waste). Lean enthusiasts also avoid specifying requirements prematurely and focus on the importance of building in testing from the beginning of the effort. Lean views learning as being essential and should be coupled with making good use of the Scientific Method. This includes establishing a hypothesis, testing and documenting your findings. With Lean, you should also implement the best results based upon your scientific study along with following and improving standards. It is essential to build in quality from the beginning as well as deferring commitment – that is making, decisions at the last responsible moment. Bringing results to market quickly is essential as are trying to balance rapid delivery, high quality, and low cost.
The People Side
From an interpersonal perspective, it is important to have engaged, thinking people who thrive on pride, commitment, trust, and applause along with effective leadership. Finally, improving the system needs to focus on examining the system as a whole. Too often we focus on one small part and get caught in our low level tasks without stepping back to see whether or not we will accomplish our end-goals.
Lean as Agile
The Lean approach is very popular among both Agile and non-Agile practitioners. One reason is that Lean’s principle of delivering as fast as possible – fits in with the Agile iterative approach.
Conclusion
You need to get familiar with Lean and its application to Agile – not to mention other methodologies including CMMI and Six Sigma. A good place to get more information on Lean is from the Poppendieck’s own website (www.poppendieck.com). Don’t forget to drop me a line and share your experiences implement Lean, Six Sigma or any other process improvement apprpoach!
Bob Aiello is the Editor-in-Chief for CM Crossroads and an independent consultant specializing in Software Process Improvement including Software Configuration and Release Management. Mr. Aiello has over 25 years experience as a technical manager in several top NYC Financial Services firms where he had had company-wide responsibility for CM, often providing hands-on technical support for enterprise Source Code Management tools, SOX/Cobit compliance, build engineering, continuous integration and automated application deployment. Bob is a long standing member of the Steering Committee of the NYC Software Process Improvement Network (CitySPIN), where he serves as the chair of the CM SIG. Mr. Aiello holds a Masters in Industrial Psychology from NYU and a B.S. in Computer Science and Math from Hofstra University. You may contact Mr. Aiello at raiello@acm.org or link with him at http://www.linkedin.com/in/bobaiello .
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