Lean Software Development Guide Lean Principles, Waste and Process

This approach relies heavily on customer validation as well as rapid prototyping and continuous iteration in order to get feedback from customers early and often. In business, the term Lean has been applied to everything from product development to human resources. In the world of software development and project management, Lean development is a methodology principles of lean software development that reduces waste and increases efficiency throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC). This project management tutorial talks about Lean development and how it can benefit your business. Since lean software development methodology offers a customer-based, adaptable and flexible system, there are no strict rules to follow in lean projects.

The goal is to recognize that people are the most valuable assets in the company. Therefore, leaders need to practice empathy, encourage people to express their point of view on work processes or problems, and ask for their opinion when making decisions. In a volatile environment such as software development, changes can occur very frequently.

Creating a Flow

Implementing lean often requires a cultural shift within the organization. Teams must embrace a continuous improvement mindset, practice open communication, and enjoy collaboration. Changing the culture can be challenging and may meet resistance from employees accustomed to traditional development practices. This customer-centric approach ensures that development efforts are aligned with customer needs and expectations, leading to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty. The concept of deferring commitment is built upon the premise that requirements change based on feedback from the customers, the competitive marketplace, or emerging technologies.

• This Lean principle is sometimes called “Respect for People” and is a principle that is often overlooked – at an unfortunate loss.
• The value stream of a business — that is, the sequence of activities needed to design, produce and deliver a product or service to customers — must be optimized in order to deliver maximum value to customers.
• By now, we realize that it is not the processes or tools but the teams and their decisions that makes a methodology successful.
• Implementing lean often requires a cultural shift within the organization.
• If employees’ needs are not met outside of the tasks they’re doing day-to-day, they’ll feel underappreciated, and their productivity will reflect that.
• At the end of the course, you will be able to apply lean techniques / methods to software development.

Once your colleagues understand that, they will be more likely to embrace the change. For our example, this restaurant observes more customers during the festive season. There is an ever-mounting pressure on the chef to cater to all these orders on time. As a result, he missed out on keeping the right balance of spices in 2-3 dishes, resulting in returned orders. This further causes rework for the chef as well as for the person who is responsible for serving.

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For example, delivering fast results is a core tenet of most Agile teams. Building quality in is a critical principle of lean software development, but it’s also the trickiest one. You are walking a tightrope between assuring quality and avoiding too much testing that creates waste. That’s why it is essential to work with a professional development team that is familiar with the lean philosophy and has hands-on experience in practicing its principles. In its essence, lean software development is a philosophy, not a project management methodology.

By eliminating waste and focusing on value-added activities, lean software development can significantly increase the efficiency of the development process. Incorporating quality from the beginning is essential for lean software development. If some activity could be bypassed or the result could be achieved without it, it is waste. Partially done coding eventually abandoned during the development process is waste. Extra features like paperwork and features not often used by customers are waste. Switching people between tasks is waste (because of time spent, and often lost, by people involved in context-switching).

Seeking Constant Improvement

It means you’ll be able to better adjust your product to the current customer needs in the next iteration. Second, releasing a product before other companies offer similar software gives you a huge competitive edge. Third, delivering fast saves money and makes the development process more result-oriented. Lean software development is a concept that emphasizes optimizing efficiency and minimizing waste in the software development process. This approach has its roots in the Lean manufacturing movement of the 1980s.

Lean software development is a translation of lean manufacturing principles and practices to the software development domain. Adapted from the Toyota Production System,[1] it is emerging with the support of a pro-lean subculture within the agile community. Lean offers a solid conceptual framework, values and principles, as well as good practices, derived from experience, that support agile organizations. Using Lean software development aims to remove waste from the engineering process and maximize customer value delivery.

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As soon as that tool becomes available, the extra hour is no longer required to create value for customers. That hour instead becomes more like a debt payment against the money saved by not investing in the new machine. Another subtle waste caused by over-planning is that the planner may not be as much of an expert as the implementer when it comes to the details.

Any time you begin a new (to you) way of doing things, you have to expect that not everything will go according to plan from the outset. However, once you’re past the “break-in period” with lean, you begin to realize its benefits. Lean is identifying and eliminating waste — improving the flow of processes.

Mapping the Value Stream

This approach allows for faster validation of ideas and provides opportunities for continuous improvement based on real-world usage. The overall goal of Lean is to optimize for value by reducing waste, a process which ultimately aims to deliver the right product and to develop the product right. In other words, Lean helps ensure the product being built (software in this case) meets the customer needs while also ensuring it is delivered without major defects. Lean software development is a methodology in software engineering that originates from Lean manufacturing.

Lean development focuses on reducing the 7 wastes in the manufacturing process — namely overproduction, waiting time, transportation, processing, inventory, motion, and scrap. LSD principles got their start in manufacturing and aimed to optimize the production line to reduce waste and boost value to the customer. Adopting lean software development principles often involves significant changes in organizational culture and processes. Resistance to change can be a major hurdle, and it is crucial to communicate the benefits of lean software development clearly and ensure that all team members are on board with the new approach. Easy Agile is dedicated to helping teams improve their processes and agile methods.

Pros and Cons of Lean Software Development

We, however, stick to the principles point of view of Lean Software Development, all of which aim to speed up the delivery and extend high value to the end-user. The below lean principles are the best practices to make your product rule over the market. If you are a project manager or developer interested in implementing Lean development principles, start by researching and incorporating some critical practices into your workflow. You can soon reap the benefits of this robust methodology with little effort. Unless an engineer is directly involved in manufacturing, they may only be slightly familiar with “lean” principles. Long considered a way to greatly improve manufacturing efficiency, lean can be applied to any business or production process, in any industry.