Lean Software Development, [
ISBN 0321150783 (
amazon.com,
search)] by MaryPoppendieck
? and TomPoppendieck
?
From the intro, this "is a toolkit for translating widely accepted lean principles into effective, agile practices that fit your unique environment."
Mary and Tom have seen lean principles in action, both in manufacturing and product development, and have lots to say about how to apply it to software development. I knew there was a strong linkage between the "lean" world and agile software development, and this book makes that linkage very explicit. One notable aspect of the book is that it provides a theoretical understanding as well as being very practical -- most books only fill one of those two shoes.
Highly recommended.
--CharlieTrainor
I had pretty much the same feeling reading this book and
LeanThinking, as I did when I first started reading up on agile methods. It all felt like common sense and that's a comment I hear from a lot of people new to lean/agile. However, I feel, and have experienced, that there is a huge gap between viewing or perceiving something as common sense and actually applying that common sense to the work you are doing. Also, both this book and
LeanThinking put these principles and practices into a different perspective by showing how they have worked in the manufacturing business. Seeing the parallels between the work done in manufacturing a bicycle and crafting a software program is very powerful.
Mary and Tom do a great job in the book of presenting specific tools for applying all this "common sense". They start by introducing the seven principles of lean thinking when applied to software development:
- Eliminate waste
- Amplify learning
- Decide as late as possible
- Deliver as fast as possible
- Empower the team
- Build integrity in
- See the whole
The rest of the book presents the 22 thinking tools that are all tied to the seven principles. Mary and Tom use a lot of real world examples of the usage of these tools and they do a very good job of explaining how each of them could fit into an agile ecosystem.
The book is pretty compact and the authors have clearly eliminated all waste from it because I was never bored.
I can't recommend it enough!
--DadiIngolfsson 26.3.2004
A
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