AGILE and LEAN

Agile methodologies are based on incremental and iterative way of product development. They rely on the foundations set by the Agile Manifesto and the twelve Agile Principles. They are suitable for finding innovative solutions to complex and adaptive problems by eager and motivated teams who work in a trust-based culture and environment. It promotes innovation by trying out and experimenting new and untested ideas and solutions thereby cultivating a ‘fail-fast, learn-fast’ attitude.

Agile and Lean Software Development

The sole purpose of lean development is to promote customer value and simultaneously act on waste eradication as far as business processes are concerned. The prime concept that lean development works for is the optimization of the flow of products and services through the entire value streams. With the help of lean development, human efforts can be lessened by creating processes that aim at waste elimination along the entire value streams. As a consequence, the products can be manufactured swiftly and with fewer defects and flaws when compared with the archaic business systems. The lean development is a great way to manage and cope up with the flickering demands of the consumers that change with time.

The seven principles of Lean Software Development are:

• Eliminate waste
• Amplify Learning
• Decide as late as possible
• Deliver as fast as possible
• Empower the team
• Build Integrity in
• See the whole

Agile and Lean Development Principles

Let us see how Agile ways of working implements these principles:

Eliminate waste: This is done through minimizing multitasking, quickly delivering working products on each iteration, and getting the focus of the team to take the stories/tasks to completion throughout the project.

Amplify Learning: This is implemented by sharing the learning of each and every team member through retrospectives and building on it continuously

Decide as late as possible: One way Agile does this is the scope of the sprint and detailed work plan of the sprint is decided just before the start of the sprint.

Deliver as fast as possible: Once the sprint backlog is decided, the team tries to deliver the product backlog items according to the priority.

Empower the team: Agile has self organizing teams which are empowered and motivated

Build Integrity in:  This is done by ensuring the quality parameters through the Definition of Done (DoD)

See the whole: The team tries to improve the delivery process by retrospectives and reducing technical debt

Agile and Lean complement each other well by incorporating the principles into the product development practices. In addition, the teams can further improve the productivity and efficiency of the processes by using Value Stream mapping (VSM) and eliminating bottlenecks.