What is Lean Software Development? Definition and Principles

As these words are written, Toyota, the leading lean exemplar in the world, stands poised to become the largest automaker in the world in terms of overall sales. Its dominant success in everything from rising sales and market shares in every global market, not to mention a clear lead in hybrid technology, stands as the strongest proof of the power of lean enterprise. IT Project Manager, Web Interface Architect and Lead Developer for many high-traffic lean development web sites & services hosted in Italy and Europe. Since 2010 it’s also a lead designer for many App and games for Android, iOS and Windows Phone mobile devices for a number of italian companies. Lean thinking, to be successfully applied within a work group, must be well understood by all team members. Lean Software Development consists of seven basic principles, all of which are considered extremely important within the Agile community.

But it requires a considerable amount of focus to accomplish; your team will need to understand exactly what they’re responsible for at every stage of the product development lifecycle. Lean product development also places an emphasis on continuous learning; as your team analyzes each iteration of the product and adjusts according to those insights, they’ll gain more expertise and knowledge along the way. Lean also aids teams by allowing them to continuously learn and fine-tune their processes, which leads to a more efficient software development team. With a focus on delivering value to the customer, teams are better equipped to avoid wasting time and resources on features that do not provide value or that are not important to the target audience. This is an approach coined by Eric Ries in his book The Lean Startup, published in 2011. It’s mostly for new product development teams and startups who haven’t yet formulated a finished product.

Find and eliminate waste

This means that developers continue writing code that may or may not be defective, resulting in more defects and therefore requiring more testing. Lean is often counted as one of several Agile frameworks — Scrum and Kanban are two others. The Agile methodology is detailed in the Agile Manifesto, which contains a set of values and principles that guide the Agile frameworks.

Furthermore, the principle of delivering as fast as possible allows software teams to start profiting from their MVPs before competitors. It allows them to adapt later versions of their solution to the market needs and maximize their overall ROI. Lean aims to eliminate waste which can be considered all process activities that don’t add value to the final product delivery. Here, we should mention that there will always be necessary waste (ex., quality assurance).

A Brief History of Lean

«Respect for people» also relates to giving people the responsibility to make local decisions about their work. Respect for people is at the core of Lean, and it means creating a work environment where people feel valued. They therefore revisited Ford’s original thinking, and invented the Toyota Production System. It is important to understand that, although the guiding principles are similar, Lean Development and Lean Startup are two completely different concepts and therefore should not be confused or overlapped in any way. Another way to sync with team members and keep everyone apprised of project status is through daily standup meetings or scrums.

• That means at a software company, everyone in the value chain gets to play at least some role in the ideation and design.
• Typically, the “development” part of research and development (R&D) follows a highly linear process, traveling a set development path from concept to design to building, testing, bug fixing, and then, finally, launching.
• To start defining value from the user space, lean product teams begin by actively establishing tactics to better understand their users.
• Those can be internal (ex., peer review) and external (ex., gathering feedback from customers).

Scrums provide accountability, transparency, and an opportunity for teams to connect. The change in desire from cars to more variety meant that manufacturers had to start using different materials, production lines, and skilled labor. When comparing Lean and Agile, experts often point to the similarities rather than the differences. Lean and Agile work together so seamlessly that it’s difficult to tell them apart. Roadmunk is the best roadmapping tool for building and communicating your product strategy. But overall, product leaders should carefully measure the implementation of lean and make changes according to the results.

Empower the team

Agile is a project management approach and a mindset, defined by several values and principles, coined in the Agile manifesto from 2001. Lean, on the other hand, is a methodology that was first conceptualized before WW1 but successfully implemented in the factories of Toyota from the 1930s. While there are similarities between the two, it can be said that Agile is a superset of Lean as its working principles were inspired by Lean thinking. The main difference between Lean and Agile is that the former focuses on building continuous flow within processes while the latter on iterating the release of functionalities to the market. Knowing the Lean software development principles helps you adopt Lean thinking and focus your operations on continuous improvement. Understanding and practicing each of the Lean development principles can enhance the value delivery capabilities of your company, so customers remain satisfied with your products or services.

According to Lean, having a Quality Control phase at the end of the development process is a waste. Traditionally, the quality of a product is not checked until the later stages of a project which can create many problems. For one, it slows https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ down the ability of a team to get early feedback on their solution. For another, it creates the waste of unevenness in the process because when development is in progress, quality control might remain idle for a long time, and vice versa.

Differences between lean product development and lean production

The Toyota Production System was born from a need to meet the varying tastes of car buyers. Lean manufacturing first became popular in the 1960s, when other car companies like Ford couldn’t keep up with the demand for cars. As the antidote to suboptimization, optimizing the whole is a Lean development principle that encourages Lean organizations to eliminate these sorts of vicious cycles by operating with a better understanding of capacity and the downstream impact of work. In this guide, we go over a few best practices and clarify a few misconceptions about lean development. However, lean implementation has shown that it is a good practice to deliver fast in order to see and analyze the output as early as possible.

Scoring wasn’t an issue in the Wild’s two preseason games, in which Iowa outscored the Rockford Icehogs 13-5 between the two matchups. Those teams faced off in the first round of the playoffs last season, and it was Rockford who swept the two-game series to advance. Sign in to create your job alert for Manager Operational Excellence Lean Management jobs in Frankfurt, Hesse, Germany.

Qualitäts- Prozess- und Lean-Manager:in (Junior)

It enables you to leverage your entire enterprise to build a sustainable system for consistently creating profitable value streams that, from the start, eliminate upstream issues. Too often, organizations segregate the people developing new products, processes, and services innovation from the production and delivery parts of the business, fragmenting the value chain. This approach causes delays, cost overruns, quality problems, and a host of other issues. Worse, it can do tremendous damage both to the culture and overall performance of the organization. Lean Product and Process Development (LPPD) counters this tendency by bringing the entire organization together in the innovation process.

Additionally, it’s easy to revert back to the original feature/UI when needed. Advertise with TechnologyAdvice on Developer.com and our other developer-focused platforms. We have a list of the Top Project Management Certifications to help get you started.

Should You Use Lean Software Development?

There has been a traditional belief in most businesses about the decision-making in the organization – the managers tell the workers how to do their own job. In a work-out technique, the roles are turned – the managers are taught how to listen to the developers, so they can explain better what actions might be taken, as well as provide suggestions for improvements. The lean approach follows the agile principle[6] «build projects around motivated individuals […] and trust them to get the job done»,[7] encouraging progress, catching errors, and removing impediments, but not micro-managing. An agile software development approach can move the building of options earlier for customers, thus delaying certain crucial decisions until customers have realized their needs better. This also allows later adaptation to changes and the prevention of costly earlier technology-bounded decisions.