An Overview of Lean - Agile Software Development

Since my days working with manufacturing, I’ve been hearing about Six Sigma and about Lean. There is a lot to these programs. The “elevator speech” says that Six Sigma focuses on reducing variation and Lean focuses on reducing waste.

Last year, I gained my Six Sigma Green Belt certification helping an internal help desk to improve self-service. We used a Lean Six Sigma approach and was a great process, very customer-centric which surprised me. I had thought six sigma was all about statistics. OK, well it had a lot of statistics, which made my little mathematical heart go pitter pat. But there was a lot of human focused work, too. It was fun… and it worked to improve their process.

Great for production work. But does it to software development? It doesn’t seem that six sigma is quite the right set of tools for that.

Alan Shalloway, the CEO of Net Objectives recommended a great book to me: Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit for Software Development Managers by Mary and Tom Poppendieck. I loved her book. And the Net Objectives course based on the book was really a lot of fun. It really got me to thinking.

Lean-Agile Straight Talk was born out of a desire to help us and others share our thoughts about this emerging topic with people who really care about being more effective and suffering less to develop software. Without a bunch of hype. So, over this series of podcasts, I hope to explore how this applies to Requirements, product development, testing.

How do you fit it in to an organization that has been used to waterfall processes? Can you do that? How do you help organizations make the transition? What are the human-centered tools that help? What makes for a successful ScrumMaster? And what in the world is a ScumMaster anyway? To start with, it seems like it would be worthwhile to get the 30000 foot view first.

That’s where we will start, with some interviews with Alan Shalloway, CEO of Net Objectives.

Recommendations - Training by Net Objectives

• Lean Software Development
• Design Patterns
• Scrum

Recommendations - Reading

• Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit for Software Development Managers by Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck
• Product Development for the Lean Enterprise: Why Toyota's System Is Four Times More Productive and How You Can Implement It by Michael N. Kennedy
• Design Patterns Explained : A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design (2nd Edition) (Software Patterns Series) by Alan Shalloway and James Trott
• Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle

Music used in this podcast:

• “Pizzaman” and “Chocolate” ©2006 William Cushman: ghostnotes.blogspot.com

For more information, contact info@netobjectives.com or visit us at www.netobjectives.com