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Agile and lean: Better apart or better together?


By Katie Serignese
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March 26, 2010 —  (Page 1 of 2)
Organizations practicing agile software development often talk about being “lean.” Yet since lean is most often associated with manufacturing environments, its applicability to software development can create some confusion. Are they both methodologies? Philosophies? Something in between?

Lean development expert Mary Poppendieck explained the difference as simply this: “Lean is a philosophy, a set of principles, not a methodology. It’s 'How do I think about getting better?' ”

While many shops practice agile exclusively and fare just fine, others look to adopt both lean and agile practices to be as efficient and cost-effective as possible. “You can do one without the other,” said Alex Adamopoulos, CEO of emergn, a lean and agile consultancy firm. “But you won’t get the same results. They’re really better together.”

Although classical definitions relate agile to the technical side and lean to the business side of an organization, Adamopoulos has also found ambiguity between them. “Words are starting to get blended,” he said. "Kanban board," "lean visual control" and "Scrum board" are being used by developers who practice both agile and lean.

Some agile and lean terminology may overlap, but according to Adamopoulos, lean practices help organizations achieve things that agile processes cannot do on their own. To him, lean means significant improvement in aligning IT with the business side, an enabler to getting faster results and a collaborative effort to bring business owners in, making them more aware of the project earlier in the process.

To Forrester principal analyst Jeffrey Hammond, lean development is also a trend toward changing the decision-making process and power—seeing the two move down the development chain. This adds even more flexibility to the development process than agile because it enables developers to choose what technology they want to use without much overhead.

Additionally, “Lean software is a response to the bloat we see in our industry,” Hammond said. “Think about some of the stacks out there and the number of millions of lines of code you have to install to get a simple ‘Hello world' app into a browser.”


Related Search Term(s): agile

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Comments


03/30/2010 09:45:20 AM EST

it's not the process that slows development down. it's likely the people that are a problem. if you concentrated more on weeding out the less capable, then your organization should be more efficient. use the activity vector analysis (AVA) as a condition of employment, but ensure the analysis is performed by highly trained people. you will get a bigger bang for your buck.

United Statesbrutallyfrank


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