Lean Software Development: Values and Principles

Hi Folks, I know it’s been more than a month from my earlier post. I had been busy with my certification preparations, apologies for not maintaining constant pace. Till I start writing this post, I was thinking Lean as one of the agile methodologies but it is not. It is beyond that. It can be part of any agile methodology by providing its values, principles and practices to implement to eliminate waste & improve efficiency. In this post let’s discuss about Lean History, Lean’s connection with agile, Lean values, Lean principles and Lean practices. Let’s get started with Lean history

Lean – History:

1988: The term “Lean” was first coined by John Krafcik in his article, "Triumph of the Lean Production System," based on his master's thesis at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Krafcik was working as a quality engineer in a joint venture in California by the Toyota, GM (General motors) and NUMMI (New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc.) 

1991: Word “Lean” was mentioned in the book “The Machine That Changed the World: the Story of Lean Production” by James Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos as a term to describe the Toyota management approach. The idea that lean can be applicable to software development is developed only after 1-2 years after the term was first used

1992: The term Lean Software Development was first coined as the title for a conference organized by European Union in Stuttgart, Germany.

1993: Robert “Bob” Charette explored better ways of risk management in software projects and suggested the concept of “Lean Software Development”

1995: Five pillars of Lean thinking are defined in the book titled “Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in your Corporation” by Womack, James P and Daniel T. Jones

Five pillars of Lean thinking are value, value stream, flow, pull and perfection. These pillars have become the working definition of Lean for the next decade. People started identifying waste activities in the workflow and started eliminating them to reach perfection which made Lean to reach wider audience. Since then eliminating waste has become exclusive property/practice of Lean till date.

Womack and Jones didn’t share the definition to the world, Toyota management principles are difficult to describe or to analyze. The word “Waste” is described in detail with three Japanese terms:

Muda – literally meaning “waste” but implying non-value-added activity

Mura – meaning “unevenness” and interpreted as “variability in flow”

Muri – meaning “overburdening” or “unreasonableness”

In any process, perfection is achieved through identifying and eliminating the waste (non-value-added activity). We do not have specific definition for Lean as there are many

How Lean is connected with Agile:

In 2001, Bob Charette was invited to attend the meeting at Snowbird, Utah, where the agile manifesto for software development was authored. But Bob couldn’t attend it. Despite of Bob missing agile manifesto meeting, Lean was considered as one of the agile approaches to software development.

Lean Software Development – Definition: it is very challenging to define Lean Software Development as it is not equal to specific method or process. Instead we could say any software development process is “Lean” if it is aligned with the values and principles of the Lean Software Development. So, one must tailor his/her software development process by understanding Lean principles and by adopting the core values of Lean. Let’s discuss on Lean values and principles

Lean values:

In 2011, the Lean Systems society published a set of values. Those values are

·         Accept the human condition

·         Accept that complexity & uncertainty are natural to knowledge work

·         Work towards a better Economic Outcome

·         While enabling a better Sociological Outcome

·         Seek, embrace & question ideas from a wide range of disciplines

·        A values-based community enhances the speed & depth of positive change

Accept the human condition:

To develop any product, we need people (Human beings) and process. So if you want to develop any product, you need to deal with process and people. Dealing with human beings is quite complex as human behavior is led by their emotions, thoughts, traits. Very important thing to note is that human behavior is not constant; it changes with stress, situations, workload and fatigue. Thus human psychology must be considered when designing the processes within which humans work. Accept and embrace the human condition at any situation rather than to denying it and expecting robot like behavior.

Accept that complexity & uncertainty are natural to knowledge work:

In software product development, there are many unpredictable things like the behavior of customers, product market, defects, required rework, process workflow and team work. There is high chance of random behavior in all the things mentioned. The purpose of the project, vision and scope tend to change based on these unpredictable things. In most of the project initial stages complexity and uncertainty is unknown & is known up to some extent after several studies which helps in managing risks. But variability can’t be anticipated in advance. Thus systems of Lean Software Development should be in a position to adapt to changing circumstances

Work towards a better Economic Outcome:

Lean Software Development should focus on producing a better economic outcome. Let’s see who deserves what

Investors and owners of businesses deserve a ROI (Return on investment).

Employees and workers deserve a fair rate of pay performing their work.

Finally, Customers deserve a good product/service for a fair price.

Better economic outcome is nothing but more for less by managing the capital in most effective way possible. Capitalism is acceptable till it contributes business value and customer satisfaction.

While enabling a better Sociological Outcome:

Organizations need to create a great place to great work where employees respect each other by accepting different human conditions; in turn it develops a system which respects the psychological and sociological nature of people

Seek, embrace & question ideas from a wide range of disciplines:

Teams need to seek continuously for new ideas, brainstorm on it and embrace them to improve quality of process and product. This kind of culture needs to be developed in all disciplines involved in software product development

A values-based community enhances the speed & depth of positive change:

Share your new ideas/innovations and discuss with a value based community which in turn gives more improvements as many people practice your ideas in their projects. Sharing knowledge with good community always helps in going deeper with the positive change and helps in continuous improvement

Lean Principles:

Coming to Lean principles, there are 7 lean principles which seems to agreed & practiced globally with most of the software development processes.

The 7 principles of Lean Software Development are

1.          Eliminate Waste

2.          Create Knowledge

3.          Build Quality In

4.          Defer Commitment

5.          Optimize the whole

6.          Deliver Fast

7.          Respect people

Eliminate Waste:

To reach perfection, you need to identify all non-value added activities in the process and eliminate them. Waste can be in any form i.e. communication cost, co-ordination cost, people meetings, rework etc. Team needs to eliminate all these to increase efficiency in people, process and product quality

Don’t create anything which doesn’t give value to the customer. You need to be careful with the process you follow, people in your team that both are creating value to the customer.

Value has a value only if its value is valued. So, create innovative and technologically advanced products which are valued by your customers. Eliminate anything that does not add customer value

Developers need to write less code as it is directly proportional to the tests they need to write & automate while developing software

Create Knowledge:

Create a work environment where employees are continuously having scope to improve and they are working on it. Team should be like a small research institute, where they do lot of experiments and share the output with value driven community.

Team should get trained in problem solving methods. Leaders should listen to their team members and encourage them to find solutions to the problems encountered.

Use short iterative cycles to provide quick, constant feedback to ensure focus on the right things and make sure that team is working constructively on the action items identified & set.

Build Quality In:

Quality product developer needs to think about product intrinsic quality before he/she starts writing single line of working code, should not wait till integrating with other code

Automate wherever possible i.e. automate anything which is routine like unit testing, integration testing, builds, installations.

Refactoring plays main role in achieving high quality of the software. Refactor the code, the tests and the documentation continuously to keep it simple. There shouldn’t be any duplication

Keep Validating and re-validating all the steps involved in the process. If you find any metric or practice with no value, discard it.

Defer Commitment:

Don't make decisions until enough is known to make the decision, Defer important decisions to the later point till it is mandatory to decide so that you will be discovering more information about the same day after day. Sound understanding of the problem is mandatory to make the decision

To start any work with uncertainty, start with known information and explore the unknown. The most important thing is to keep the team in the right direction

Increments developed should be coupled as loosely as possible to enable implementation in any order. Implementing change will be easy in later stages as components are not that dependent on each other

Optimize the Whole:

Optimization should happen by keeping whole system (or process) in mind and shouldn’t optimize parts with the hope that it will optimize the whole by itself.

Always focus on the entire value stream even if you are working for a small change requested by stakeholder i.e. customer.

To optimize the whole, Organizations need teams with great leaders, great engineers, business analysts, process coaches, sales, marketing gurus, secretaries, functional architects etc. All together can deliver great final products to their stakeholders

Deliver Fast:

To deliver fast, you need to repeat the good things which worked well for you and eliminate practices which created obstacles for you

Management need to keep searching for hidden issues within the team whether it be process or people. Stabilize the work environment based on continuous feedback from the team.

Keep the work in progress items based on your capacity (Velocity). Learn to say NO to new work items if you feel it will impact your current work/or over burden you

Focus on all the possibilities by which you can reduce cycle time. Brainstorm, come up with innovative ideas, stream line the process and reduce time to market

Respect People:

Respect your team & team members for what really it is, for what they do and how they do. Encourage them for their passionate involvement in the organization’s work

Work culture, the most important factor created by employees & organization and empowers employees in the organization

Organizations need to provide training and guidance to the leadership team members to implement lean thinking in their work environment

Move responsibility and decision making to the lowest possible level, because employees at low level know better how to implement difficult algorithms and apply state-of-the-art software frameworks than anybody else. Let them think and decide on their own.

Lean Practices:

Apart from lean values and principles, there are quite a number of practices commonly adopted. Some of the lean practices are mentioned below. Let’s discuss about these in detail in later posts

ü  Cumulative Flow Diagrams

ü  Visual Controls

ü  Virtual Kanban Systems

ü  Small Batch Sizes / Single-piece Flow

ü  Automation

ü  Kaizen Events

ü  Daily standup meetings

ü  Retrospectives

ü  Operations Reviews

To conclude this post, there are no hard and fast prescriptions to follow from Lean Software Development. Follow any of the available software development methodologies but make sue that actual process definitions are aligned with the Lean principles and values to be lean. Definitely Lean is a methodology which will trim the fat from the software process (Starting from requirements to product delivery to the customer)

Hope you got an idea of Lean software development and its value and principles. Thank you for stopping by and reading my blog, it means a lot to me. Help me to improve by giving your feedback. I appreciate it very much! Please feel free to reach out to me

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-Balaji Sathram