The Art of Lean Software Development: A Practical and Incremental Approach [Kindle Edition]

Curt Hibbs (Author), Steve Jewett (Author), Mike Sullivan (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

This succinct book explains how you can apply the practices of Lean software development to dramatically increase productivity and quality. Based on techniques that revolutionized Japanese manufacturing, Lean principles are being applied successfully to product design, engineering, the supply chain, and now software development. With The Art of Lean Software Development, you'll learn how to adopt Lean practices one at a time rather than taking on the entire methodology at once. As you master each practice, you'll see significant, measurable results. With this book, you will:

• Understand Lean's origins from Japanese industries and how it applies to software development
• Learn the Lean software development principles and the five most important practices in detail
• Distinguish between the Lean and Agile methodologies and understand their similarities and differences
• Determine which Lean principles you should adopt first, and how you can gradually incorporate more of the methodology into your process
• Review hands-on practices, including descriptions, benefits, trade-offs, and roadblocks
• Learn how to sell these principles to management

The Art of Lean Software Development is ideal for busy people who want to improve the development process but can't afford the disruption of a sudden and complete transformation. The Lean approach has been yielding dramatic results for decades, and with this book, you can make incremental changes that will produce immediate benefits.

"This book presents Lean practices in a clear and concise manner so readers are motivated to make their software more reliable and less costly to maintain. I recommend it to anyone looking for an easy-to-follow guide to transform how the developer views the process of writing good software."-- Bryan Wells, Boeing Intelligence & Security Sytems Mission System

"If you're new to Lean software development and you're not quite sure where to start, this book will help get your development process going in the right direction, one step at a time."-- John McClenning, software development lead, Aclara

About the Author

Curt Hibbs has always been slightly obsessed with new technologies and tracking technology trends. But he will tell you that this is simply because he is lazy, always looking for new methods and technologies to make his work easier and more productive. This led to his discovery of Ruby in 2001 (when it was still relatively unknown outside of Japan) and to his founding several highly successful Ruby open source projects.

For most of his professional career, which started in the early 1970's, Curt has been a consultant to well-known companies like Hewlett Packard, Intuit, Corel, WordStar, Charles Schwab, Vivendi Universal, and more. He has also been a principal in several startups. Curt now works as a Senior Software Engineer for The Boeing Company in St. Louis.

Steve Jewett is a software developer with The Boeing Company, where he is involved in the development of network-centric cognitive decision support systems. His software experience started with BASIC and FORTRAN on a DEC PDP 1170 back in high school. The trail from there to the present day includes a litany of languages, a broad spectrum of design strategies and development methodologies, and a bevy of software projects, some of which were actually successful. Over a 20+ year career, he has developed software for automated test equipment, weapon/aircraft integration, embedded systems, desktop applications and web applications. His primary areas of interest are software architecture design and software development methodologies, particularly agile software development and its relationship to lean processes.

Mike Sullivan has over 6 years of experience teaching at the university level, and has spent the last 4 years working with software teams in small companies and large corporations to drive valuable solutions and improve team dynamics. He is currently working in a small research team within a large corporation, implementing Lean techniques to improve the software his team delivers. Mike's interests include golf, Cardinals baseball and teaching.

Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 1776 KB
• Print Length: 144 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0596517319
• Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (January 15, 2009)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0026OR3CQ
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #319,814 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Too Lean An Intro to Lean, March 18, 2009

By 

James Holmes "Co-Author 'Windows Developer Po... (South Central Ohio) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Art of Lean Software Development (Paperback)

This is a concise work weighing in at around 120 pages. Its point is to give people a 30,000 foot overview of many things relating to Lean software development, and it's absolutely targeted to technical and business decision makers who are trying to learn a bit about how they can benefit from Lean.

The problem with the book's approach is that the authors fly past points so quickly that there's not enough serious discussion of the crucial topics central to Lean. I also think the authors spent the majority of the book covering topics which aren't specific to Lean. I'm all over source control, continuous integration, test driven design/development, etc., but these are fundamentals for many other methodologies or approaches. The authors don't spend enough time hitting hard the concepts of eliminating waste, value stream mapping, tight cycles, etc.

Worse yet, in the authors' attempts to give only high-level coverage of concepts they do a bad job of describing some critical issues. As an example, I screamed, literally, when I found this passage in their section on Reuse Existing Software:

"Software reuse exists in many different forms, each of which affects codebase size differently:

* Copying source code from one component to another reduces coding time and debugging, but it actually increases codebase size."

Dudes. Really. Copy and Paste development is awful for so many reasons. An increase in codebase size is utterly the last issue you should be talking about when discussing why you should never do it. Instead, focus on the impact of copy/paste on code complexity, violation of DRY principles, the loss of clarity, increased dependencies, and the replication of bugs throughout your codebase.

This isn't an awful book, and the authors generally did a good job laying out the material. I also loved that they included a good intro to Kanban. The problem is a lack of focus and a sacrifice of vital information in an attempt to turn an introduction to Lean into some sort of 30 minute infomercial.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I'm the author of this book -- Intended Audience, February 3, 2009

By 

Curt Hibbs (St. Louis, MO USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Art of Lean Software Development (Paperback)

I am one of the authors of this book and I just wanted tell you about who this book was written for and who it was not written for.

If you are already well versed in either Lean or Agile software development, this book is NOT for you.

If, however, you know little or nothing about Lean and Agile software development, but you've hearing the buzz about them and you want to know more without having to read a 500 page tome, this book is for you.

This book is intended to introduce you to the most of the important topics in the world of Lean and Agile software development, provide some concrete guidance on what is most important, and give you references to allow you to dig deeper in each topic.

If you are part of that target audience, please let me know what you think of the book.

Thanks,
Curt Hibbs

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Lean development, March 12, 2009

By 

Dwayne Phillips (Reston, VA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Art of Lean Software Development (Paperback)

I saw this book on the shelf in the local book store. I had read several things by the Poppendiecks on Lean Development; O'Reilly publishes high quality books, and so I bought it. I like the book with a few mild disappointments. First, the book is thin - about 120 pages. That is fine, but the publisher made it thin by using tiny print. Why do they do that? Second, the chapter that taught me the most was the final one. I didn't like waiting to the end to find the best part of the book.

The authors start the book with the Standish Group Chaos study. I didn't think anyone did that any more. The publisher or editor should have removed that section. Then they move into descriptions of Agile methods and Lean methods. They have plenty of good material here. If you are in management and do not recognize these terms, this book is for you. The authors give proper credit to Tom and Mary Poppendieck.

I didn't like their description of the Waterfall or serial model. I have seen that model work quite well in many projects under the right circumstances. A description of how to pick a model depending on the circumstances would have been good here.

The major part of the book (chapters 3-8 of a 9-chapter book) describes the main practices of Lean software development. The authors present the practices in the order they recommend the reader adopt them. The practice and their recommended order of adoption are:

Practice 0: Source code management and scripted builds
Practice 1: Automated testing
Practice 2: Continuous integration
Practice 3: Less code
Practice 4: Short iterations
Practice 5: Customer participation

There is little that is new in this book. Its good points are that, even with the tiny print, it is brief, to the point, and gives the reader a path to follow to work lean practices into an existing organization. If you are unfamiliar with lean or haven't considered it for a while, pick up this book.