ingvald

David Joyce and Dr Peter Middleton have studied the application of (what I call) Lean-Kanban in BBC.

From the abstract:

The evidence shows that over the 12-month period, lead time to deliver software improved by 37%, consistency of delivery rose by 47%, and defects reported by customers fell 24%.

The significance of this work is showing that the use of lean methods including visual management, team-based problem solving, smaller batch sizes, and statistical process control can improve software development.
….

The faster delivery with a focus on creating the highest value to the customer also reduced both technical and market risks.

There’s more info on David’s blog, and you can also read the case study itself prior to publication from there.

The Conclusions of lean manufacturing theories are not necessarily valid in the domain of (software) product development.

There’s good reasons why it’s so difficult to fix time, budget, and feature scope all at once in a software development project.

I’ve been listening to a talk by Don Reinertsen, and one of his points, although not the main point, is about variability:  if you could reduce variability in the workflow by 10%, or you could reduce capacity utilization by 10%, by far you would prefer to reduce capacity utilization.  That’s where the economic payoff is.

The reason is that increased capacity utilization increases queue size and lead time exponentially.  In other words, if you try to keep all your resources busy all the time, everything takes forever to finish.  This goes for both manufacturing and development.  Variability in workflow, however, is bad in manufacturing, but can’t be avoided in product development, and might even be exploited.

So what else is different about development compared to manufacturing?

Source:
A talk by Don Reinertsen,
Second Generation Lean Product Development: From Cargo Cult to Science