OTUG September 2003 Distinguished Lecture

Topics

Lean Software Development

Lean thinking has given the world lean by focusing on value, flow, and people.

Twenty years after introduction on the factory floor, lean thinking is finally being applied to software development, yielding a variety of agile methods.  Lean thinking is not a collection of practices or methods; it is a proven set of simple principles that guide our thinking about problems and people.

Value, Flow, and People

Decide as Late as Possible.  Deliver as Fast as Possible.  These two principles are the least intuitive and often are difficult to accept. Yet delayed commitment and fast delivery are the heart of excellent operations and soul of excellent software development. The first talk will cover:

1. The Predictability Paradox:  You get more predictable results when you minimize the amount of predicting.
2. A New Definition of Maturity:  The speed at which you reliably and repeatedly respond to the customer. 
3. Making Lean Happen: How to Open the Floodgate (if you dare)

Agile Customer Practices

Extreme Programming and other agile methods are quite specific about developer-side practices and how the developer side and customer side interact.  However, they are silent on how to discover user stories, define acceptance tests, or create an effective user interface.  The second talk focuses on customer-side practices in the context of lean thinking to ensure product integrity.

Incremental development of essential use cases and essential UI models fit naturally into the iteration cycles of an agile project.  Essential use cases extended to full-dress form directly specify many customer tests.   Additional stories and tests follow directly from the UI model that supports the use cases. Evolving and using a ubiquitous domain language for the project ensures that business rules and domain concepts are accurately implemented and validated.  The domain language is used in the use cases, the essential user interface model, the code, and the tests to enable rich bidirectional communication between the team's customers and the developers.

Speakers

MARY POPPENDIECK, Managing Director of the Agile Alliance (a leading non profit organization promoting agile software development), is a seasoned leader in both operations and new product development with more than 25 years' of IT experience. She has led teams implementing solutions ranging from enterprise supply chain management to digital media, and built one of 3M's first Just-in-Time lean production systems.

TOM POPPENDIECK was creating systems to support concurrent development of commercial airliner navigation devices as early as 1985. Even then, the aerospace industry recognized that sequential development of product design, manufacturing process design and product support was costly and non-competitive. His subsequent experience in software product development, COTS implementation, and most recently as a coach, mentor, and enterprise architect support the same conclusion for software development. He currently assists organizations in applying lean principles and tools to improve their software development capabilities.

Book

The presenters’ newly released book, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit, brings lean production and product development techniques to software development. A copy will be a door-prize for the evening.