One of the keynotes at XPDay 2008 was from Dan Jones, the author of the books The Machine That Changed the World and Lean Thinking and one of the team of people who came up with the term “Lean Production”. It was quite humbling to be in the same room as the living person who has probably been more influential than anyone else to modern business processes in every industry and all over the world.
One of the most interesting things he said was that when they were coming up with the name for what they were trying to promote they considered “agile”, but thought it would be too difficult to sell and so decided on Lean instead. Also, he didn’t have much understanding of modern software development, but at a glance saw very little difference between what we called Agile and he called Lean.
So when we talk about Lean Software Development being an Agile methodology we’ve got it the wrong way around. Agile is Lean, Scrum is Lean, XP is Lean. You were already doing Lean Software Development, you just didn’t know it!
In my mind it’s time to drop the titles (which all carry too much stigma) and simply start referring to it as professional software development.
December 14th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
I seem to remember that he said fragile, not agile, and that selling something called “fragile” was a problem. Btw, seems that your interest in this session was caught on camera (http://www.flickr.com/photos/yveshanoulle/3104705513/)
December 30th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
I also seem to recall him saying that the Americans investigated Lean and didnt like this “Jap Crap” so came up with the term Agile…
April 4th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
You misheard Gojko – Allan Kelly has also noted his remarks on the origins of the term: http://allankelly.blogspot.com/2009/02/agile-and-lean-same-but-different.html.
I’m alert even in my sleep!