Lean Software Development: A Step-by-Step Guide for CTOs

Choosing a suitable software development methodology can be challenging.

And why not? After all, software development has always been an expensive process, and one that often takes months or even years to complete.

Lean is one of the most reliable software development philosophies, focusing on eliminating waste and optimizing fast product delivery.

The idea behind it is that you stay focused on delivering value as quickly as possible instead of building unnecessary features into your product. This way, you will provide more value than initially planned.

If you're unsure about how to begin, here's a step-by-step guide for you.

We’ll give you an overview of Lean software development and all the essential Lean principles. We will also discuss how this philosophy differs from Agile and explain Lean roles and responsibilities.

Let’s begin!

What is Lean Software Development?

Lean Software Development, or LSD, applies Lean principles to software development.

Lean principles were first laid out by Toyota, the Japanese automotive manufacturing giant, to optimize development time and resources in their manufacturing process and eliminate waste.

The Lean software development methodology streamlines and optimizes the work of software developers by applying the same principles.

LSD follows an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) strategy, which enables you to speed up the development process and release a bare-minimum version of your product in the market quickly.

The MVP helps you learn from user feedback and then carry out further iterations based on that feedback, eliminating unnecessary pre-planned process stages.

What are the Seven Principles of Lean Software Development?

There are seven established principles of Lean software development that can help you build software products efficiently.

Each principle comes with a set of practices and tactics that you can apply right away to maximize customer value and avoid any waste in the process.

Let’s delve deeper into these principles.

Principle 1: Eliminate Waste

In software development, waste is anything that fails to bring business value to the customer or improve product quality.

As per the principle of waste elimination, it is essential to identify and systematically remove unnecessary activities from software development. The following software development activities contribute to waste:

• Unnecessary code or functionality: Make sure you prioritize developing only those features that add significant value to the customer. Anything beyond that will require time for discussion, development, and testing, delaying your product's TTM (time to market).
• Starting more tasks than can be completed: This adds unnecessary complexity to the system, resulting in context-switching, handoffs, and disrupted workflow.
• Delay in the software development process: Delays slow down end-product delivery and feedback loops.
• Unclear and changing requirements: This results in the team’s lack of focus, rework, frustration, and ultimately quality issues in the product.
• Bureaucracy: While good organization and management are essential, allowing more bureaucracy than is needed delays the entire software development process.
• Poor communication: This includes ineffective communication between the IT team and the stakeholders, leading to unnecessary delays, frustrations, and a drop in focus.
• Partially done work: Incomplete and partially done work neither adds value to the customer nor allows team members to learn from it.
• Task switching: Jumping software team members from task to task due to poor planning results in avoidable delays, communication breakdowns, low team morale, and poor work quality.
• Code errors and quality issues: Defects and bugs lead to extra work. They force programmers to stop what they are currently working on and focus on bug fixing. The result is abandoned work, delayed plans, and poor customer satisfaction.

To identify and remove waste from your software development process, you must avoid making elaborate plans in advance. Instead, hold regular meetings after every short iteration.

Your team members can report progress, highlight bottlenecks, and suggest changes to implement during the subsequent iterations. This allows room for constant code improvements.

Principle 2: Build Quality In

While every organization wants to build quality into its product, not all can do so efficiently. Some quality-ensuring activities contribute to different kinds of waste through excessive code testing. This is time-consuming and also pushes the development costs much higher.

The "Build Quality In" principle of Lean software development addresses such issues before they occur. Instead of relying solely on extensive testing later, we start with quality as a critical requirement from the beginning, adding it at every step.

The following tools and techniques are used in Lean development to ensure quality throughout the process:

• Refactor: Practice it regularly and keep your code clean and structured.
• Pair programming: This is an excellent method that uses the expertise of two developers instead of one. As a result, every task is carried out by two developers, leading to more effective solutions.
• Test-driven development: You can avoid quality issues by writing your tests before writing the code. Since the developer knows how the code will be tested, they are more likely to write code that fulfills all the scenarios.
• Incremental development and constant feedback: Such feedback is valuable and ensures good quality.
• Minimize wait states: If you minimize the time between code writing, testing, and bug fixing, you can reduce context switching and knowledge gaps in the development cycle.
• Automate testing: This involves automating every process that’s tedious, manual, and prone to human error.

Principle 3: Create Knowledge

This is another Lean principle that seems simple but requires discipline to implement. It involves creating knowledge through learning.

Your team must document and retain valuable learning according to this principle. This can be done by applying a combination of the following tools:

• Code reviews
• Pair programming
• Documentation
• Thoroughly commented code
• Knowledge-sharing sessions
• Training
• Methods such as asset-based design for managing requirements

Principle 4: Defer Commitment

This Lean principle is all about responsible decision-making. However, it doesn't give the team the liberty to be flaky and irresponsible in their work commitments.

Instead, it promotes the opposite. Using this principle, teams are encouraged to make responsible decisions by keeping options open, continuously gathering necessary information, and avoiding making any commitment without essential data.

What this means:

• No excessively detailed plans in advance.
• No commitment to ideas without a thorough understanding of business requirements.
• Consistent collection and analysis of essential information regarding significant decisions.

Principle 5: Deliver Fast

Often it is believed that meticulous and long-term planning is key to business success. But unfortunately, this approach can lead to problems in practice. With this method, engineers spend a lot of time building complex, monolithic systems with unnecessary features and a backlog of unfixed bugs.

In addition, it restrains them from adapting their product to ever-changing market scenarios and client requirements.

That’s why Lean engineers build an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) with essential functionality and launch the MVP product to the market as quickly as possible. User feedback helps the engineers learn and make amendments accordingly.

This approach works well to incrementally enhance a code base based on customer feedback and ditch everything else that is of no value.

Principle 6: Respect for People

Lean aims to empower team members instead of controlling them.

This principle goes beyond establishing basic human courtesy; it generates trust within projects.

How?

Engineers are granted the freedom to make decisions based on their knowledge and judgment, provided they’re experienced enough to do so.

Such an approach highly contributes to the quick application of needed alterations in the software, and it also keeps your developers motivated.

Treating your developers as competent, motivated professionals rather than robots writing code is key here.

Principle 7: Optimize the Whole

This principle emphasizes focusing on improving the entire process of delivering software, not just the development phase.

Suboptimization is a big issue in software development. There are two vicious cycles into which Lean development teams tend to fall because of suboptimization.

The first is releasing poorly coded products just for the sake of speed. When we pressure developers to deliver at all costs, they release code that may or may not meet quality standards.

This increases the complexity of the code, resulting in more bugs. This means more work for the developers and more pressure on them to deliver quickly, perpetuating the cycle.

The second issue arises with testing. When testers are overloaded, it creates long delays between developers writing code, testing it, and receiving feedback. This means that developers may continue writing defective code, leading to more bugs and requiring more testing.

Optimizing the whole principle encourages Lean teams to remove these issues by operating with a better understanding of capacity and impact.

Also Read: Code Refactoring: When and Why It's Essential

Lean vs. Agile: Key Differences

Lean and Agile are popular software development methodologies. While both methods promote productivity and fast delivery, it's essential to understand their differences for correct application.

Let’s take a look.

CTO's Guide to Lean Roles and Responsibilities

If you're planning to use the Lean approach for software development in your company, your primary focus should be on streamlining the software development process and eliminating activities that do not bring value.

And this can only happen when you have a Lean-thinking team with you.

What constitutes such a team? What are their roles and responsibilities?

Lean works well with both small and large teams. Team size doesn't matter as much as having the primary Lean roles:

1. Lean Master

A Lean Master is an experienced professional who has worked with clients in a similar environment. Because of that, they are more familiar with the project and the product.

Moreover, they possess in-depth knowledge of Lean concepts and methods and know how to apply them to reduce waste and improve efficiency.

Lean Masters support the client by:

• Establishing the goals and purpose of each team.
• Selecting and allocating resources with relevant skills.
• Mentoring and training people in Lean thinking.
• Managing a master plan and changes.
• Encouraging the team to make intelligent decisions.
• Utilizing their knowledge of Lean tools and techniques.

2. Lean Project Leaders

The Lean Project Leader serves as the core communication channel between the Lean Master and the team. They also function as a motivator.

Key responsibilities of a Lean Project Leader include:

• Leading Lean projects and teams.
• Removing barriers in the project and reporting progress.
• Offering clear communication and organizing project activities.
• Contributing to team improvement.

3. Lean Team Members

Lean teams are organized around individual processes. Lean Team Members are experts in their respective fields, including developers and testers with relevant skills. They are proficient at designing and implementing solutions.

Develop Powerful Custom Software with Imaginovation

If you want to build custom software with a waste elimination strategy through Lean, contact us at Imaginovation.

We will help you develop a customized solution that caters to your business needs.

Imaginovation is an award-winning software development company with vast experience crafting remarkable digital success stories, specializing in custom software, web development, mobile app development, and more for diverse companies.

Let's talk.