The Art of Lean Software Development: A Practical and Incremental Approach

by Curt Hibbs, Steve Jewett, Mike Sullivan

Overview

This succinct book explains how you can apply the practices of Lean software development to dramatically increase productivity and quality. Based on techniques that revolutionized Japanese manufacturing, Lean principles are being applied successfully to product design, engineering, the supply chain, and now software development. With The Art of Lean Software Development, you'll learn how to adopt Lean practices one at a time rather than taking on the entire methodology at once. As you master each practice, you'll see significant, measurable results. With this book, you will:

• Understand Lean's origins from Japanese industries and how it applies to software development
• Learn the Lean software development principles and the five most important practices in detail
• Distinguish between the Lean and Agile methodologies and understand their similarities and differences
• Determine which Lean principles you should adopt first, and how you can gradually incorporate more of the methodology into your process
• Review hands-on practices, including descriptions, benefits, trade-offs, and roadblocks
• Learn how to sell these principles to management

The Art of Lean Software Development is ideal for busy people who want to improve the development process but can't afford the disruption of a sudden and complete transformation. The Lean approach has been yielding dramatic results for decades, and with this book, you can make incremental changes that will produce immediate benefits.

"This book presents Lean practices in a clear and concise manner so readers are motivated to make their software more reliable and less costly to maintain. I recommend it to anyone looking for an easy-to-follow guide to transform how the developer views the process of writing good software."-- Bryan Wells, Boeing Intelligence & Security Sytems Mission System

"If you're new to Lean software development and you're not quite sure where to start, this book will help get your development process going in the right direction, one step at a time."-- John McClenning, software development lead, Aclara

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780596554439
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	01/15/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	142
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Curt Hibbs has always been slightly obsessed with new technologies and tracking technology trends. But he will tell you that this is simply because he is lazy, always looking for new methods and technologies to make his work easier and more productive. This led to his discovery of Ruby in 2001 (when it was still relatively unknown outside of Japan) and to his founding several highly successful Ruby open source projects.



For most of his professional career, which started in the early 1970's, Curt has been a consultant to well-known companies like Hewlett Packard, Intuit, Corel, WordStar, Charles Schwab, Vivendi Universal, and more. He has also been a principal in several startups. Curt now works as a Senior Software Engineer for The Boeing Company in St. Louis.

Steve Jewett is a software developer with The Boeing Company, where he is involved in the development of network-centric cognitive decision support systems. His software experience started with BASIC and FORTRAN on a DEC PDP 1170 back in high school. The trail from there to the present day includes a litany of languages, a broad spectrum of design strategies and development methodologies, and a bevy of software projects, some of which were actually successful. Over a 20+ year career, he has developed software for automated test equipment, weapon/aircraft integration, embedded systems, desktop applications and web applications. His primary areas of interest are software architecture design and software development methodologies, particularly agile software development and its relationship to lean processes.

Mike Sullivan has over 6 years of experience teaching at the university level, and has spent the last 4 years working with software teams in small companies and large corporations to drive valuable solutions and improve team dynamics. He is currently working in a small research team within a large corporation, implementing Lean techniques to improve the software his team delivers. Mike's interests include golf, Cardinals baseball and teaching.

Table of Contents

Preface vii

1 Why Lean? 1

The Problem with Software Development 2

The Agile Success Story 5

The Lean Success Story 10

Lean Principles 13

2 Applying Lean to Software Development 15

Lean Software Development 16

Lean Versus Agile 22

Getting Started 24

3 Practice 0: Source Code Management and Scripted Builds 27

About Zero Practices 28

Source Code Management 28

Scripted Builds 34

Discipline in an Integrated Environment 34

Summary 35

4 Practice 1: Automated Testing 37

Why Test? 39

What Is Automated Testing? 41

Kinds of Tests 43

Approaches to Testing 49

Summary 53

5 Practice 2: Continuous Integration 55

End-to-End Automated Builds 57

Dedicated Build Servers 61

Continuous Integration Software 62

Implementing Continuous Integration 63

Continuous Integration Builds Quality in 65

Resistance to Implementing CI 67

Summary 69

6 Practice 3: Less Code 71

Leaning out the Codebase 73

Developing Less Code 75

Resistance to "Less Code" 80

Summary 81

7 Practice 4: Short Iterations 83

Short Iterations Generate Customer Value 85

Developing with Short Iterations 88

The Fallacy of Iterative Development 90

Big Tasks in Little Pieces 92

Summary 93

8 Practice 5: Customer Participation 95

Customer Participation Is a Two-Way Street 96

Paving the Street 97

An All-Too-Common Problem 101

Summary 101

9 What Next? 103

Lean Thinking and the Analysis Practices 104

Kaizen 105

Kaizen Workshops 106

Value Stream Maps 107

Other Lean Techniques 109

Other Complementary Approaches 115

Where to Go from Here 117

A Resources 119

Index 123