Lean Software Development

Lean (Agile) is a word I think cannot be translated very well, it wants to express the basic meaning: at the lowest cost, the highest efficiency, the highest quality, timely and rapid response and meet customer needs. The core of the word to express is: timely and rapid response to meet customer needs. Lean has another meaning: the scope of application is Lean, that is, relatively simple and small-scale tasks or projects, or can be reasonably divided into small project sets, and the dependency is not a strong large project.

Every industry in the maturity is not very high time, or enter the threshold is relatively high, it is not effective to achieve lean, such as nuclear, aviation. Only in the development of an industry to early majority stage, lean is suitable for more extensive use, such as the automotive industry, household appliances industry, manufacturing. Of course, lean is also suitable for early innovation stages, such as market expansion, sales, new product development.

Fortunately, in the IT industry since the IT industry is gradually like the early majority phase transition period, so that I can have some understanding and application of both modes. Relatively speaking, the early stage of the industry, in order to effectively guarantee the quality of delivery, detailed-planning model or become project based is more appropriate, into the industry mature stage, Lean styled more adaptable to market demand, more competitive.

The current IT industry is divided into two types: Internal and external. First of all, external, most of the service delivery, the adoption of Lean is the largest constraint is the scope of the project (Task) and service model. If the general contracting model is adopted, the risk of the contractor will be very large and difficult to control, because the customer's demand scope is not particularly clear, the coefficient of change and the range is relatively large. If the pay-as-you-go model is used, the current enterprise management mode support and Party B's ability to provide service capabilities and pricing is not yet mature model. Similar problems are encountered in many outsourced projects or in the use of personnel, the labor output can provide services and buyers expect a large gap. This contradiction is even more prominent in providing services to the Lean Team model. In addition, a key element of the Lean model is the ability to achieve good communication, which is also a big challenge for the enterprise service class model.

For the internal category of projects, especially the Internet category of enterprises, in general, more suitable for lean mode.

1, demand analysis (product design), according to business development and corporate strategy, confirm product core function and function priority, and gradually improve. At the same time, internet companies emphasize interaction and feedback with customers to further update and collect demand and product ideas.

2, for the mature enterprise, can refer to Scrum or XP method, direct adoption.

The following is mainly about the non-mature enterprises or the initial attempt to use Agile software development enterprises in the Agile Software development need to pay attention to the problem:

1, priority in the first two phases of software engineering adoption of Agile: demand, design and development

2, for testing and results validation, combined with user story (use case diagram and flow chart) to verify that the cycle is generally controlled in 2 days, that is, the next day to verify the delivery of content, so that the station-type meeting is generally postponed to the afternoon. or adjust the meeting cycle according to the project characteristics.

3, gradually improve the bug management, test automation, Deployment automation, release automation work.

4. If there is a strict time limit, the XP method is preferred, if the scrum method is not adopted.

From Lean's core thinking and best practices in TPS applications, scrum is most consistent with lean thinking, but it feels better to use the XP approach in real-world engineering.

Lean Software Development