How can we leverage Lean insights to improve the way we work in DevOps?
Lean Software Development is the adaptation to Software Development of lean manufacturing principles and practices.
Lean Software Development has been adapted from the Toyota Production System, offering a framework, including values and principles, supporting agile organizations.
| Principle | Short description |
| Eliminate waste | Waste slow down activities. There are different kind of wastes, some can be totally removed, others offer space to optimization. |
| Aplify learning | Software development is a continuous learning process based on iterations when writing code. |
| Decide as late as possible | Software development is associated to some uncertainty, and early decisions can be made without having a proper understanding, or be impacted by new or changed requirements. |
| Deliver ar fast as possible | The sooner the end product is delivered without major defects, the sooner feedback can be received, and incorporated into the next iteration. |
| Empower the team | Managers need to learn are how to listen to the developers, so they can explain better what actions might be taken, as well as provide suggestions for improvements. |
| Build integrity in | The customer needs to have an overall experience of the system. This is the so-called perceived integrity: how it is being advertised, delivered, deployed, accessed, how intuitive its use is, its price and how well it solves problems. |
| Optimize the whole | Optimization has to be designed to improve the whole the entire organization, and not simply made to send the ball over the team wall. |
Lean and DevOps
DevOps does not offer a framework, a set of rules, or fix principles. Instead, it shows a direction toward we want to go. That is a better integration between different organization functions, the removeal of walls between them, the usage of optimized practices to speed-up development and delivery. All this, without proper culture, sharing and measurement, is useless. Lean practices can be adopted in DevOps to set in place the transformation that is required to get advantages associated to this approach.
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