Seven Principles of Lean Software Development - Eliminate Waste

January 9, 2009 by Przemysław Bielicki

Picture courtesy of Phil Romans@flickr

Peter Stevens in his newest post advices how to deal with current crisis using Lean methodologies. One of his advice is to eliminate wastes, not costs. I totally agree with it, more so it is one of the most important (at least for me) principles of Lean Software Development.

Software development organizations should always strive to produce the best products and to deliver only features that are of paramount importance to their customers. They should always try to develop those 20% of functionalities that represent 80% of the value. This need is more vivid and desired during such global business conditions. This could apply to all types of enterprises - you should eliminate all unnecessary steps and waiting periods; you should strive to get the value as soon as possible and to get only pure value without any waste.

In this post I will try to explain "Eliminate Waste" principle from "Implementing Lean Software Development - from Concept to Cash" book.

Provide market and technical leadership

Your company can be successful by producing innovative and technologically advanced products. Important thing here is that you understand what your customers value and you know what technology you're using can deliver.

You don't necessarily have to invent something that is new and unknown. Note that the richest companies just replicate good ideas adding just few features that are unique and that satisfy customers (e.g. Google Mail, JIRA issue tracker).

You can be the market and technical leader by improving existing ideas and fitting them so that the final product will attract more customers.

Create nothing but value

You have to be careful with all the processes you follow. Be sure that all of them are required and they are focused on creating value.

If you are e.g. creating lots of documents that have been always produced but nobody really knows why and you are pretty sure nobody reads them - it sounds like waste you have to eliminate. Another example of waste is when you have to wait for a long time for some other department or team to answer your questions or uncertainties and this waiting period always stops you from moving forward. Waiting is the most apparent and obvious waste - though it is not always easy to eliminate.

You should measure your process cycle efficiency and strive to keep improving it - it will probably never be perfect but it can be constantly getting better and better.

Write less code

This advice is quite aggressive and when you work in old-fashioned waterfallish organization saying that you should limit the features in your system to only those that are absolutely necessary and deliver value can be perceived as some kind profanation. Well.... it's not.

The more code you have the more tests you need thus it requires more work and if you're writing tests for features that are not needed you are simply wasting time. If you don't have tests (is it possible?) it's even worse - there is bugs in a code that is not used and they will appear in the least predictable moment. I personally remove a lot of code when I take over some projects. I focus on the required features and remove all stuff that I "may need in the future". The rule is simple: if you need it, add it - if you don't need it right now, remove it. Another argument standing for writing less code is that usually with less code the overall complexity is lower and the code base is easier to understand thus maintain and support.

Last thing - the easiest way to identify unnecessary code is to use code coverage tool. More details can be found at the provided link.

Eliminate Waste

I hope pieces of advice given above will make it easy to understand how to put "Eliminate Waste" principle, which is the most important one IMHO, in practice. If you need more detailed description with more examples and more sophisticated explanation you should definitely go to "Implementing Lean Software Development - from Concept to Cash" book.

PS. Six remaining principles described earlier can be found here:

1. Respect People
2. Deliver Fast
3. Optimize the Whole
4. Defer Commitment
5. Build Quality In
6. Create Knowledge

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