Lean - Software Development

Lean has gained tremendous currency in manufacturing industry. Even in service industry Lean has significant influence. But in software development Lean is still in infancy due to two dominant reasons:

1. High level of manual intervention: Can you imagine coding done by robots at present state of technological sophistication. I understand up to a large extent code is automatically generated but still crucial part is requires human ingenuity.

2. Software engineering is still not a science or engineering but art or at the best craft. There is tremendous debate is going around in industry but still craftsman and artist are winning.

Software development is like Research and Development work where new materials and processes are being invented to fulfill newer needs in better way. Nevertheless, pioneers like to convert art and craft into science and engineering and bring automation into main stream to achieve consistency in quality and reducing the cost of development.
Therefore keeping the spirit of engineering, Lean can be applied in software development. The basic principles of Lean in software development can be transformed.

1. Add Nothing But Value (Eliminate Waste): Think of Agile methodologies in software development. Scrum and User stories are few of the efforts in this direction.

2. Center On The Resources Who Add Value: Since Software Development is labour intensive, value humans and then non human resources like software, hardware and processes.

3. Flow Value From Demand (Decide as late as possible): Work only for those features which are essential for customer now not in future. Think of Just in Time paradigm.

4. Optimize Across Organization: Do ever hear of SOA?

5. Optimize Across Organizations: I hope, you know about Cloud Computing?

6. See the whole: Do not make code as Spaghetti. Follow the principle of Code depth first and the breadth in moderation.

In line with seven wastes of manufacturing, software development also has its own wastes:

1. Overproduction  Extra Features: User stories, Scrums

2. Inventory  Huge amount of investment in work in progress. Think of water fall model. Details of Stories for current iteration

3. Over Processing  Paralysis by Analysis. Follow Test Driven Development, Daily build, write enough code to just pass unit tests. Extra Steps: Co-location, better communication

4. Motion  Finding Information: Figuring out what to do, where to go, and how to do.

5. Defects  Defects Not Caught by Tests: Test driven development. Catch defects in early of SDLC.

6. Waiting  Requirement gatherers are waiting for customers, designers are waiting for requirements, Coders waiting for design, testers waiting for code, and finally customer is waiting for product. Release often and early

7. Transportation Handoffs: Close interaction among developers, designers, testers and certainly with customer. Source code branch merging, email maze.


Reference:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_software_development
2. http://www.leansoftwareinstitute.com/art_ilsd.php
3. Applying Lean to Software Development, an Excerpt from The Art of Software Development by Sara Peyton
4. http://leansoftwareengineering.com/
5. http://poppendieck.blogspot.com/2003/04/lean-software-development.html
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muda_%28Japanese_term%29
7. http://www.leaninnovations.ca/seven_types.html