How to Advance Lean Software Development (Beyond the 'Toyota Way')

21.05.2012
The Japanese word Muda loosely translates as waste. The core element of is to eliminate waste--or, in more North American terms, to "cut the fat." While applying lean concepts to manufacturing may seem straightforward, there is little agreement on what that term even means for software, or if it applies.

I'll start at the beginning, explaining where lean manufacturing came from, and, apply the lean idea to software development and cover the implications of lean software.

You may know that lean comes from Japanese methods, most notably the (TPS), which was largely created by Taichi Ohno, Toyota's chief engineer. The word lean, however, did not come from anywhere in the Far East but was first used by two American researchers, James Womack and Daniel Jones, in their 1990 book .

The great business success story of the day was McDonald's, who took a good burger and standardized it. Womack and Jones did the same thing to TPS; they took the practices they observed and made them rules, calling the collection of methods lean."

We'll talk about the practices in a moment. For now, let's talk about standards, heavily associated with "lean" and one principle of the .