Lean Differentiation - Software Development

Agile revolution in software development started with the motto: “Functional software developed under comprehensive documentation”. This motto brought the foundation for lean approach along with differentiation between mass production methodologies and lean theory. For example, the upper level of maturity predicts defined processes thus the initial definition/specification should be perfect. As a result large detailed specifications were developed.

Essentially the huge amount of information was not comprehensive on team and developers’ level, thus consultancy companies were hired in order to teach the team how to use the employed processes.

The cost of current approach was certainly over expectations. SEI (Software Engineering Institute) set up the methodology and principles reflected its vision of project management enhancement. These settings elaborated even more processes and tools.

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Growing integration companies offered more processes and tools, which promised perfection of the lifecycle.

It didn’t work. In race for processes and tools we forgot about the primary paradigm of agility – individuals and interactions are more important than any processes and tools. On the turn of centuries when new leaders and brands as Yahoo, Google emerged on software market with strong intention to support and develop startups, the importance of agility in processes was recognized by publicity. The former attitudes were not suitable for fast innovation of Internet market, thus the time for writing requirements was significantly reduced.

The chosen approach is designed to include the intensive work, trust in people and loyal attitude towards their failures. Refactoring, which is also used in mass production approaches, was recognized at the first time as renovation and exclusion of uncertainty but not as rework in common sense.

The agile movement delivered the fresh highly trustful and collaborative culture with focus on customer collaboration instead of agreements’ negotiating. Any requirements, even if they are carefully written cannot last for long time thus people fail to accomplish them accurately under the time pressure.

It is like a rule – written communication cannot be stable under the influence of inner factors. These factors include vacations and sick leaves, people memory breakouts and, of course, market impact. Discussing the evolution of approaches starting from mass production and till lean, there is a necessity to underline that market is one of the most influential values. Market strategies change frequently, products’ positioning can be modified from time to time, new competitors deliver new products and services, and on the top the manufacturer should be aware of economic environment changes.

The outcome is – the time from specification till delivery is highly important for competitiveness of business solution. The recognition of this relationship brings understanding of time relevancy of requirements thus the understanding of short cycles’ importance and time efficiency of delivery. Responding to change is more important than following the plan is the valuable paradigm of agility. So within new era of agility in software development the number of myths was blown up along with methods grown around them.

Companies were focused on refactoring as cheaper and more efficient substitution of being perfect. The culture of high trust, good self organization, delegation of duties and tolerance to failures became a good substitution to contracts, commitments, audit and arbitration used in previously mass methodologies. The time, which was spent earlier on writing requirements, was significantly reduced. The relentless desire to reach efficiency throughout the life cycle wasn’t addressed by the earliest manifests of agility.

Professor Frederick Taylor (Kanigel, 2007) differentiated desire of efficiency as the core principal of Scientific Management. Time and motion factors were set as primary values of Scientific Management and the main reasons for optimization of workforce on mass production enterprises. Prevailing management practice that predicted the Lean Methodology appearance was focused mainly on overhead principle, where transactional and coordination costs played the most important roles and overall efficiency was achieved by traditional economy through the large batch sizes broadly used by Western management.

Japanese managers have chosen the different approach of reaching efficiency in production. They understood if transaction and coordination were overestimated creation an economic outcome is unreal task, so the overheads should be reduced thus the small batches will become efficient. The efficiency of small butches’ process is approved by direct relationship noticed between butch size and overall development cycle time. One of the most important paradigms that play a great role bounding batch size and overall project success is related to dependence between the batch size and cycle time.

The main idea assures that smaller batches give the opportunity for the right product to appear on the market at the right time. This relationship brings additional business value for business. For example, the economy of scales paradigm along with big batch sizes caused the discounts made by the US auto producers at the time of over production. Wrong business model and mistakes in specifications were identified as the most crucial mistakes in the case with US auto manufacturers.

On the other hand using small batches approach manufacturers become more flexible in accordance with market demands. Western management while focusing on cost and efficiency criteria throughout the 20th century has lost the understanding of boundaries between value and overall efficiency of the process. Lean strategy is a paradigm that blows away “the ancient belief” in efficiency through economies of scales strategy. Lean attitude and approaches has fulfilled the reforms started by Agile theory