Lean-Thinking provides a few key mantras to follow, attend to the system, the workflow and quality. Most people have heard of "just-in-time" and "stop-the-line" and tend to think Lean is about building cars. It isn't.
It's a mindset that can be applied to any industry or type of service. In software, one needs to shift the thinking from waste (which can be seen in the physical world) to one of removing delays. There are many aspects of a development organization that contribute to delays.
These include:
- Having the development group work on too many things
- Not properly aligning the work across the value stream
- Large work items
- Slow feedback
- Not having cross-functional teams
- High technical debt
- Lack of automation
This talk shows how each of these directly causes waste, lowers productivity, raises cost and lowers quality. It also points to steps you can take to alleviate these challenges.
