Implementing the Lean Concepts of Continuous Improvement and Flow on an Agile Software Development Project: An Industrial Case Study

The idea of applying lean principles to software development has been gathering a lot of interest over the last decade. Several books have been published exploring the lessons learned from manufacturing around lean. Some books have also taken the principles of lean manufacturing and provided the guidelines for adapting the same to software development. However, there is still a huge need for providing empirical evidence of application of lean principles to software development through real case studies. This paper attempts at making a contribution in that direction, by exploring the implementation of the ideas of continuous improvement and flow, which are so central to lean, on a real life industrial project. Besides exploring the practices that aid these concepts in agile software development, this paper also discusses some of the metrics that can be used for measuring and tracking progress of such a project. The study shows that applying the concepts of continuous improvement and flow to agile software development does seem to have significant benefits, and is something that needs to be extended further and applied to different project situations.