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Lean vs Agile


I personally haven’t heard this question before, but Martin Fowler mentions that he has been asked whether a team should use agile development or lean development for a project. The answer is that they’re not alternatives.

Lean development is a type of agile development.

In fact, Mary and Tom Poppendieck title their book “Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit.” And the introduction describes the book as a set of thinking tools for translating lean principles into effective agile practices.

In his post, Martin refers to Richard Durnall’s thoughts on using lean principles with agile projects, which I also enjoyed.

The better question is, how many lean principles are appropriate to implement for this project?

This entry was posted by Scott Vlaminck on Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 1:26 pm and is filed under Agile Processes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Further Discussion (3 Responses so far. Add yours)

  1. fsilber said...
    The article would have been more useful if it had included a definition of Lean software development (rather than merely a vague allusion to Japanese automobile manufacturing processes), or at least a link to an article defining Lean software development.

  2. Scott Vlaminck said...
    fsilber, for more in-depth discussion about lean development than the two posts linked to, I highly recommend reading some of the essays by the Poppendiecks. Here are a few (from their Essays section):

    - Lean Development
    - Lean Programming
    - Principles of Lean Thinking (pdf)
    - Lean Software Development - From a Developer’s Perspective (pdf)

  3. Lean vs Agile | Project Oriel said...
    […] posted an good reminder about the roots of Lean (something we like at work): Martin Fowler mentions that he has been asked […]

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