Software Development: Lean + Agile = Results Essay

James Coplien, Gertrud Bjornvig. Lean Architecture for Agile Software Development. John Wiley & Sons Ltd. The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom, 2010.

“Agile” was first introduced in 2001, by a team of software engineers looking to improve their adaptiveness and responsiveness to ever-changing requirements. Not knowing where to begin, the team began by formulating principles, which they would use to guide their new development process. Which, in turn, lead to the creation of the Agile Manifesto, and thus a new methodology was born.

First, let’s take a look at Agile, in particular the role of scope. Several traditional software development models came about in the 1960s, such as incremental, spiral and waterfall modelling. Over time it was realized that the software development team did not realize all of the needs up front. Thus, the customer was was not delivered what was expected. It’s essential to have an outline of who, what, when and where but this is often a transforming list.

The Agile Methodology Principles makes the development much faster because the primary importance is given to the customer satisfaction and continuously delivers product. Even though requirements change at the ending phase the product is developed. The Agile development insist the self-organizing team which can create requirements, best architectures, best models. The Agile development promotes a distinct way of thinking to build things and methods to deliver continuous improvement of product. It facilitates to make best practices and decisions together. It a development to promote the adaptive planning, continuous improvement, evolutionary development and delivery, and required time to complete work. It encourages for rapid response to change in the whole development cycle. The project team prefers agile development to move in a creative and quick way. The project progress also depends on working software and project environment and support is provided and built by the individuals. They promote the sustainable environment. Constant attention is provided to the technical excellence and best models are given by the agile methodology. This principle helps the project team members

“Lean means creating more value for customers with less” (Krejewski, L., Ritzman, L.P., & Malhotra, M.K., 2013). Implementing this into a project can make the project very successful at a lower rate of cost and time. There are five steps in allowing the lean process to work successfully. This process is easy to remember but not always easy to achieve. Specifying the value from the customer’s point of view of the product that the customer is interested in purchasing is the first step. Identifying all the steps of value for the product the customer wants to purchase and eliminating the steps that are unnecessary is the second step. Creating a sequence of steps that flow in a consistent fashion and will flow smoothly toward the customer is the third step. Introducing the flow of the product that the customer is interested in purchasing and allowing the customer to pull value from the product is the fourth step. The fifth and final step in the lean technique process is “as value is specified, value streams are identified, wasted steps are removed, and flow and pull are introduced, begin the process again and continue it until a state of perfection is reached in which perfect value is created with no waste” (Lean Enterprises Institute, 2015).

For years companies have turned to IT (Information Technology) to make things easier and reduce the waste of paper and human computers. When companies find themselves regularly maintaining and upgrading their software is there room for Lean in software development? With business requirements perpetually changing can a business get to the place where the system is good enough? Cost cutbacks, faster time-to-market, improved products and differentiated services are now the essential pillars in managing any software development process. The shift has been to move away from the customary Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) approach to newer standards that provide higher certainty and decreased risk by ensuring that business deadlines are met. (Pillai, A., Pundir, A., & Ganapathy, L., 2012, p. 107).

Agile techniques should be used to solve the current issues faced by the company as agile techniques normally being used by the software industry help the business to act in response under the unpredictable situations faced. In Agile methodologies opportunities are been provided to evaluate whether the project is under the direction all through its development cycle. All this is being accomplished with the help of regular tempo kept in work, and the teams must show a product which is having the desired potential.

Agile is an iterative and incremental (evolutionary) approach to software development which is performed in a highly collaborative manner by self-organizing teams within an effective governance framework, with "just enough" ceremony, that produces high quality solutions, in a cost effective and timely manner which meets the changing needs of its stakeholders [1].

Software development is a field where developers thrive to provide products faster, better and very inexpensive methods. “Agile Development” term used for several iterative and incremental software development methodologies. Each agile method is unique in its approach, they all impart a typical vision and core attributes. As matter of fact all the methods are fundamentally incorporate with each other and having a review system provides successive ways to enhance, refine and deliver a software system. The below figure represents the steps followed in agile development

The conception of lean can be traced back to late 1980s, which was used to talk about Toyota production system. Through using lean management, Henry Ford create a high production and low stock, and fulfilled manufacture in a short period of time in the late 1910s (Arnheiter & Maleyeff, 2005).

The Lean methodology is a process management methodology that examines and enhance processes from the customer perspective. It looks to create proceedings that creates

Lean Software Development is essentially a transformation of lean manufacturing and IT principles and is a branch of agile development framework. The core concept here being eliminating waste. At the same time CMMI is a capability maturity model integration which is a process improvement technique that is used to bring about an improvement in a project, process or the entire organization for that matter. In this paper, we will first start, first, the background of lean will be explored i.e., Agile and CMMI. After that, how Lean and CMMI, although two techniques for an entirely different purpose could still work in conjunction to enhance a software

Software development is one of the highest demands in all over the world. We use software development techniques to solve the problems and to satisfy customers. Agile software development is a conceptual framework for software; it is also a group of software development methods based on iterative development. In 2001, agile software development was created by seventeen people with a desire to find alternative approaches to software development. The most important thing about agile methods are team work, conveying information to the team, face to face conversation, and satisfy the customer. There are various methodologies but I am going to describe the most popular ones.

This paper discusses about Traditional Software engineering, Agile software development, the Waterfall software development model and also a new concept of Agile software engineering. After a thorough analysis of the paper, I could relate it to topics of Traditional Software Engineering (TSE) which is the process of developing software products. It deals with Cost estimation and budgeting, scheduling, Requirements analysis, Design, Implementation, Testing and Deployment, Measuring products and processes, Quality improvement, Maintenance and so on… Another concept that I could relate to was

As we saw throughout the last forty or so years is that computer systems frequently evolve and that developmental change is inevitable and software development is no stranger to this, which is where agile development or the term that some use agile software development comes into play. This is a concept that searches for alternatives to the traditional way of managing a project and based on the foundation that change is essential to software development. Throughout this paper, we will look at the reasons that brought about the change in thinking with regard to software development, discuss some of the key principles of agile development, methods under agile development and the benefits of the use of agile development. Let’s begin this document with a discussion into what brought about the change in thinking.