Lean Software Development

Monday, 13 February 2012

Don’t jump to conclusions. Don’t join the Cult of Done. Wise words from Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit by Mary and Tom Poppendieck:

In 1988 Harold Thimbleby published a paper in IEEE Software titled “Delaying Commitment.” He notes that when faced with a new situation, experts will delay firm decisions while they investigate the situation, because they know that delaying commitments often leads to new insights. Amateurs, on the other hand, want to get everything completely right, so they tend to make early decisions, quite often the wrong ones. Once these early decisions are made, other decisions are built on them, making them devilishly difficult to change. Thimbleby notes that premature design commitment is a design failure mode that restricts learning, exacerbates the impact of defects, limits the usefulness of the product, and increases the cost of change.

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  1. You need to come back and work with us – Lean is hawt topic of the year here!

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