It’s Lean, But Is It Agile?
Iterative methods are closely aligned
By Jennifer deJong
June 15, 2007 —
(Page 1 of 3)
Kent Beck was giving a talk about agile software development to a group of business executives, when he noticed one audience member who just wasn’t engaged.
“The guy’s arms were folded and his body language said he didn’t like my message,” recalled the inventor of Extreme Programming (XP). But when Beck made reference to the lean development approach, the guy’s face lit up. “Why didn’t you tell me [agile and XP] are lean manufacturing for software?” he asked Beck after the talk.
But are lean software development and agile software development—of which XP is the most prominent example— one and the same?
They both are iterative approaches to developing software, and in some respects lean and agile are closely aligned, said Beck. Several other agile experts interviewed by SD Times agreed. But when asked whether lean software development is an agile methodology, alongside the others that fall under the agile umbrella—Adaptive, Crystal, Dynamic Systems Development Method, Feature-Driven Development, Scrum and XP—only one of the experts said yes.
Beck did not answer yes or no, but transformed the question instead. “If an XP programmer joined a team that had been practicing lean, would [he] feel right at home? I expect the answer is yes.” By contrast, if the XP programmer joined a team doing waterfall development, he would likely feel he had landed in “a different country, on a different planet,” said Beck, referring to the traditional approach to building software, where each stage completes, before the next is begun.
Lean software development is derived from the lean manufacturing approach, which Toyota originated in Japan as early as the 1940s, said Mary Poppendieck, co-author with Tom Poppendieck of “Implementing Lean Software Development,” among other books. She said that the process of building cars, for example, isn’t exactly the same as that of developing software. But the principles of lean manufacturing, known earlier as just-in-time manufacturing, apply to software development too.
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