Lean Event Abstacts
Here’s a taste of the valuable information that will be presented by our panel of experts at the Lean event.
Speakers and Topics
- Jim Sutton – Lean, Agile, and the Human Condition
- Alexandre Boutin – Creating and Maintaining Scrum Documentation Effectively
- Emmanuel Chenu – Avionics, Agility and Lean
- David Jackson – Lean Thinking Inside and Outside a Software Engineering Company
- Cyrille Comar – Open DO: Creating an open community around agile approaches to critical systems development
- Roberto di Cosmo – Lean principles in Open Source, and the road ahead
Lean, Agile, and the Human Condition
By Jim Sutton, Author of Lean Software Strategies (Lockheed Martin)
Lean and Agile have grown up from entirely different roots: Lean, from a desperate post-war Japanese automobile industry, and Agile, from the oft-brutal software world of the 1990s. .
It’s not surprising then that there are differences between the two. Nevertheless, the hard soils in which both sprouted drove them to the same realization: The way to survive tremendous hardship is to put people first. This led each, in its own way, to align the motives of system developers with those of system buyers and users. This trumped earlier approaches that, for the most part, focused solely on the almighty balance sheet. In a delicious irony, Lean and Agile have both proven that putting people first also improves the balance sheet…considerably.
With people firmly in mind, we will consider ways to apply Lean principles to produce high-integrity software, at lower costs and higher profits, to the delight of our customers. We will explore things shared between Lean and Agile (such as short cycle times), as well as important differences (such as an emphasis on early planning vs. emergent behavior).
Finally, we will return to where both approaches began-people-and consider how the ideas that inspired Lean and Agile can be applied to improving the general human condition.
Creating and Maintaining Scrum Documentation Effectively
Alexandre Boutin, Yahoo
Many companies are facing big challenges in creating and maintaining documentation. As for improving software projects, agility principles could be used for documentation, making this activity much more effective and efficient. This presentation will propose some tools and practices for being more agile in documentation writing and recommend guidelines for Scrum practitioners.
Avionics, Agility and Lean
Emmanuel Chenu, Thales
“Would you take a flight in a plane that relies on software developed by practicioners of eXtreme-Programming?”Almost surprisingly, Agile Software Development has successfully brought value in avionics.This presentation will introduce the difficulties encountered in this particular segment of the industry and how eXtreme-Programming and Scrum have greatly helped to deal with some of them. Then, we will consider how these Agile practices contribute to implement most of the principles of Lean in order to grow products of value while reducing costs.
Lean Thinking Inside and Outside a Software Engineering Company
David Jackson, Praxis High-Integrity Systems
Praxis considers Lean principles to be a key part of the development and delivery of its world-class system engineering capability. This presentation will outline our approach to Lean thinking and its applicability to software development and system engineering problems. It will demonstrate how our approach to low-defect software engineering supports key concepts of value, waste elimination and flow, and also how the Lean approach applies to the whole organisation to support our software development capability. Examples will be taken from our software development processes, our consultancy experience, and also from improvements to our internal business processes.
Open DO: Creating an open community around agile approaches to critical systems development
Cyrille Comar, AdaCore
Critical systems often have to comply to specific certification standards, such as DO-178 in avionics. Such standards usually impose some level of traceability between artifacts (requirements, designs, code, tests, …) produced during the development cycle. This talk will describe an initiative aiming at developing a community interested in developing open tools facilitating agile development & certification as well as reusable components ready to certify.
Lean principles in Open Source, and the road ahead
Roberto di Cosmo, University Paris Diderot Paris 7
It is astonishing to see how many similarities one can find between Lean principles and the working of some Open Source communities, which do not necessarily know Lean, while practicing it deeply: after all, one of the cornerstones of Lean principles is putting customers and people first, and one of the well know mantras in Open Source is that an Open Source project starts by ‘’scratching a developer’s itch”.
We consider that Open Source has the potential to push Lean even further, by blurring completely the customer/provider distinction, and building ecosystems, while introducing software transparency, which is quite new for industry.
Whether Open Source will deliver on this promise, will depend on many factors, some of which are exciting subjects for advanced research. The Lean principles leading to blurring traditional barriers among roles along the flow is also easy to see at work in successful Open Source projects where it is possible (which does not mean easy) to take part in all phases of a project.