The study reveals improvement areas in terms of lead time and quality in a traditional software development process of a large manufacturing-oriented organization, and identifies four obstacles to the application of a Lean software development framework in order to achieve such improvements. The data from interviews are matched to four predefined categories.
These categories are evaluated using value stream mapping and a framework of seven common improvement areas in software development. A large project and task tracking system indicate that lead time is a real problem in the process.
The most significant improvement area is wait time for change approval meetings. A second prominent improvement area is the large amount of approval handshakes. At least a few of these handshakes are always approved, thus adding unnecessary lead time to the process.
The four most imminent obstacles in adopting lean software development are identified through estimating the efficiency of two in-house derivations of Scrum and Kanban. The first obstacle is deep vertical but narrow horizontal expertise among developers. With some systems, there’s only one developer who knows how to maintain the product.
This makes it impossible to work as a team which is an imperative principle of lean. A second obstacle is how the teams are arranged organizationally. They have a functional setup over three departments and three managers, which to some extent create a silo mentality, rendering cooperation difficult.
A third obstacle is how the teams are arranged geographically. Split over two locations, manufacturing and headquarters, they have different customers, objectives and a plain unfamiliarity with another that has reduced the will and opportunity to communicate and coordinate.
A fourth obstacle is the inherent conflict between the prescriptive activities of ITIL, optimized for IT operational services, and the adaptability of agile methodologies, optimized for rapid change and empirical decisions. ITIL fulfills a sometimes uncalled for need to get all changes approved through several layers of management.
The study concludes that Lean software development is in conflict with many traditional values of a manufacturing organization. Although lean may be prevalent in other parts of the organization, this does not necessarily include the IT function. IT still seems to have hard time grasping the lean concepts of flow, waste and value.
Source: Uppsala University
Author: Norrmalm, Thomas