Lean on ME: What can software learn from manufacturing?

Host: David Whitlock

Date and Time: Wednesday, 1:00 PM

Lean on ME: What can software learn from manufacturing?

What do I I need to learn?

• New Product Integration
• Six Sigma?  Danger!  (We don't necessarily want to stamp out variation)
• How to deal with "waste"?
• In software, we need to be cognizant of local versus global optimization
• Swarming is an example of a global optimization
• Idle work versus idle people
• In Mob programming, some people might appear idle
• Setup and teardown time
• Utilization versus productivity

Is refactoring "waste"?

• No, it's like setup/teardown: refactoring keeps the work space clean which promotes safety, productivity, and quality
• Should we treat people like "machines"?
• Maybe?  "Would you treat your servers that way?"  (Would you over-work them, ignore them when they show signs of stress, etc.)
• Toyota Production System (TPS) has slack built in.  They don't have the machines at 100% utilization

Acknowledge that the failure and its root cause is in the system, not the individual

• See/visualize the gemba
• Instrument software to be able to assess quality
• This is analogous to being able to verify the quality of a part that is misaligned by 0.5 millimeters -- a human can't see it

Find the value stream

• Must be the customer's value stream, not just the engineering process
• Start at the end (deliverables)
• Iterative to surface cognitive biases

Andon: Do we respect people enough to support them when they pull the chain?

Lean for defining and prioritizing upstream work

Look for a piles of Work in Progress (WIP) in the system

• Limit WIP and make it visible
• Ideas are inventory (waste)
• How do we kill (discard) ideas quickly and make it clear as to why?
• "Options" with expiration, instead of "backlog"
• Coalesce similar backlog items

New Product Inception

• In manufacturing, car companies will prototype partial "cars" to learn
• Like a "stub" in software
• Kaizen: Keep changes small
• "Concurrent Engineering"
• Walking skeleton

Is there such a thing as Takt time in software?

• (Takt time is the available production time divided by customer demand.  It's used to match production with demand.)
• Can we ever deliver features as fast (or faster) than our customers can think them up?
• Cadence (like a 2-week Sprint) is not takt time
• If you have small stories that can be predictably delivered, can you establish a takt time?
• Perhaps not because the "assembly line" (the environment in which the software is deployed) is always changing/evolving

"Waste" is software is anything that doesn't contribute to value

• Focus off removing waste and focus on delivering value
• Does reducing variability among create humans actually end up introducing variability and quash innovation?

Andon may be a leading indicator of quality

Use Kanban to make work visible

• Makes decisions visible, especially decisions made based on tradition
• Might those decisions or certain metrics be waste?

What books do you recommend?

• "Principles of Product Development" by Donald G. Reinertsen
• "Theory of Constraints" by Eliyahu M. Goldratt 
• "The Phoenix Project" by  Gene Kim and Kevin Behr 
• "This is Lean" by  Niklas Modig and Pär Åhlström 
• "System of Profound Knowledge" by W. Edwards Deming 
• "The Lean Machine" by Dantar P. Oosterwal
• "Toyota Kata" by Mike Rother 
• Behavioral Engineering

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David Whitlock
Adjunct Lecturer
Portland State University