tagged by: lean
AgileVersusLean
This question is one I've run into a few times recently. It's not a question I can answer quickly as the question is based on a false premise about the relationship between lean and agile. So first I need to go into some history to help explain that relationship.
26 June 2008
bliki
ToyotaFailings
One answer for this is to take a sense of proportion. Lean manufacturing techniques were the underpinning of Toyota's rise from an insignificant company in the 1950's to a global giant in the 2000's. By the 1990's other car companies, and many other manufacturers, were busily copying Toyota's techniques. The general sense is that copying these techniques did much to raise the overall quality of cars in the last decade or so. I would be very surprised if the recent problems at Toyota are enough negate that half-century of success.
2 March 2010
bliki
MetaphoricQuestioning
As regular readers of my work may know, I'm very suspicious of using metaphors of other professions to reason about software development. In particular, I believe the engineering metaphor has done our profession damage - in that it has encouraged the notion of separating design from construction.
As I was hanging around our London office, this issue came up in
the context of Lean Manufacturing, a metaphor that's used quite
often in agile circles - particularly by the Poppendiecks
16 December 2004
bliki
