Tuesday, June 08, 2010

Agile Software Development and Lean Thinking

I think agile software development practices are by and very useful and in the spirit of lean thinking. Software development is a domain that is not equal to say manufacturing cars. There will naturally be differences in how lean ideas are applied. And then within different software development organization their will be differences.

There certainly can be issues with how agile is adopted. And how you look at features and releases can make sprints seem like bad batches. Kanban is being adopted more and more for agile teams as an alternative to sprints.

There is certainly some of http://agilemanifesto.org/ which seems to be against lean. "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" But in my experience the agile community is very in tune with lean ideas but it is also an area very much filled with experimentation and with fairly big areas still far from settled. I discuss software development fairly often on my blog.

I see a strong future for agile software development and continue to work on using the concepts at work to build a successful software development organization, upon a foundation of Deming and lean manufacturing ideas.

In response to: Agile software development does not equal LEAN thinking

Related: Agile Practices are Needed, Not Just Words - Improving Software Development with Automated Tests - The Importance of Making Problems Visible

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