There's Something about Lean: A Case Study

Abstract

One of the ideas gaining significant interest at the moment is "how can we apply Lean manufacturing principles to software development?" There is however, limited information on how Lean is being used by industry practitioners and if the principles and practices are as effective as current interest levels suggest it might be. We have used a case study to explore the practicalities of how one high-performing, open source team, has adopted Lean practices. We found that the existing meritocratic decision-making culture of the team under study appears to have greatly assisted the team's application of Lean principles to their software development processes.