2.4.1C: Agile Variations and Lean Software Development

[MUSIC]

So those are the fundamentals of the Lean Software Development methodology.

Really what it boils down to is reducing waste

while improving the quality of your product.

These principles are the ones which have been outlined in Mary and

Tom Poppendieck's book written in 2003.

However, there are other principles, which have been added as the community

of Lean software developers, evolved over time.

One of these additional principles is to use the scientific method when

building a system.

So instead of carrying on with a project's design using hunches, guesses,

and experience,

this principle encourages developers to base their development off real data.

As a software product manager, you'll need to initiate experiments to test ideas, and

collect data.

Analyzing and acting upon this data, allows software developers and

clients, to make informed decisions about the product.

You gain credibility by backing potential decisions with data.

This, of course, works well with the decide as late as possible principle.

Another, additional principle, is encouraging leadership.

An extension on the principle of empowering the team,

encouraging leadership, aims to bring out the best in each person on the team.

Encouraging leadership means enabling initial individual developers

to be courageous, innovative, inspirational, and collaborative.

So those are the Lean software development principles as a whole.

You may find them by many names over the web, but the idea is still the same.

Again, these principles are: eliminating waste, amplifying learning,

deciding as late as possible, delivering as fast as possible,

empowering the team, building integrity in, and seeing the whole.

At the end of Poppendieck's book, is written a warranty.

This warranty says, Lean principles are warranted to be tried and

proven in many disciplines, and

when properly applied, they are warranted to work for software development.

Proper application means that all of the Lean principles are employed, and

that thinking tools are used to translate them into agile practices, appropriate for

the environment.

This warranty is invalid, if the practices are transferred directly from

other disciplines or domains, without thinking.

Or if the principles of empower the team and build integrity in, are ignored.

So while it may be easy to see this process as simply a philosophy for

reducing waste and improving your product, it's not enough to apply

typical management practices, in order to achieve these results.

At the core of Lean may be this idea of reducing waste and improving your product.

However, encouraging your team to build a product the way they want to,

and ensuring that proper programming practices are followed,

are a large part of that, and they should not be ignored.

While I talked about Lean,

did it seem apparent to you that a lot of these principles are very Agile like?

Well, Lean Software Development follows a lot of Agile principles.

In fact, Poppendieck's book is entitled,

Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit.

In the book, Poppendieck says that Lean Software Development

further expands the theoretical foundations of Agile software development.

By applying well known and accepted Lean principles to software development.

But, it goes further.

By providing thinking tools to help translate Lean principles,

into Agile practices, that are appropriate for individual domains.

So, Lean is a tool kit.

It's a methodology.

A set of practices that allow you to create better software,

and have happier clients.

It encourages fast paced iterative development, client interactions,

and the use of proven software development techniques, to be successful.

Lean is powerful, and it's useful, whether your organization is big, or small.

So keep these Lean principles in mind, as you develop as a software product manager.

It's likely that you'll see them used more and more in the coming years, and

it will be useful for you to have some knowledge about them.

So that's Lean.

In the next lesson, I'm going to briefly show you about one practice,

which is frequently used alongside SCRUM and Lean, Kanban.

I'll see you there.

Software Processes and Agile Practices

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Impartido por:

Kenny Wong

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