The Double Paradox of Lean Software Development
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Presentation |
Introductory
Methodology and Business
Room:
Lab 1
Timeslot:
17.09.08 15:45
Speaker: Mary Poppendieck
Abstract
If you were the owner of an airline, what percentage of seats would
you like to fill: 65% or 75%?
If you were developing new components, what percentage should succeed:
50% or 100%?
Surprisingly, a lean company would target the lower percentages and be
more successful.
How can this be? The first paradox of lean development is that by
doing one thing at a time instead of trying to do many things
simultaneously, everything will get done faster. The second paradox
of lean development is that if you never fail, you never learn, and
learning is the essence of product development.
Come to this talk to hear why it is better to focus on throughput
rather than utilization, and why you want to try lots of stuff and
keep what works, rather than picking the winners in advance.
Outline
- Paradox 1: Thrashing, caused by overload, is much less efficient than leveling the workload and working at a regular cadence.
- Queuing Theory applied to software development.
- Six rules to reduce thrashing and speed software development throughput.
- Paradox 2: Spending 10K on ten experiments is more likely to produce a winner than spending 100K on the best bet.
- Set-Based design what it is and why it works
- X rules to improve knowledge through exploring multiple options.
Required experience
General experience with agile development is useful.
Expected audience
Senior developers and testers, team leads, and managers.
The objective is to get the audience to think, to challenge the
assumptions that underlie how they organize their work, and experiment
with new ways of organizing work to achieve dramatic improvement.
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Mary PoppendieckMary Poppendieck started her career as a process control programmer, moved on to manage the IT department of a manufacturing plant, and then ended up in product development, where she was both product manager and department manager. After Mary left the corporate world in 1998, she found herself managing a government software project where she first encountered the word -Y´waterfall.¡ When Mary compared her experience in successful software and product development to the prevailing opinions about how to manage software projects, she decided the time had come for a new paradigm. She wrote the award-winning book ´Lean Software Development¡ to explain how the lean principles from manufacturing offer a better approach to software development. Over the past six years, Mary has found retirement elusive as she lectures and teaches classes with her husband Tom. Based on their on-going learning, they wrote a second book, ´Implementing Lean Software Development.¡ A popular writer and speaker, Mary continues to bring fresh perspectives to the world of software development.