Yet Another Agile Model

Sat through a talk on yet another new agile concept - 'lean software'. Mary Poppendiek talked through a history of Lean manufacturing - focussing on Toyota as a case study and attempted to draw parallels with the software engineering process. The link looks pretty tenuous to say the least but there were some interesting insights - i.e the equivalent of inventory in car production is any software development in progress - i.e any system not in production and the key concept becomes minimising this 'waste'. Also, there was a principle about taking decisions as late as possible which seemed a bit counterintuitive as a blanket axiom - surely it depends upon the number of potential downstream decisions resulting from a decision at the very least. with all these things, the biggest problem is that they are presented in these conferences with the implicit message that they are all well tried and tested techniques and are widely used and applied with no real data to back that up. In any case, most of the underlying message here was basically not different from general agile techniques like scrum and XP.
As an aside, it is phenomenal how much buzzword generation actually goes on at breakfasts and lunches during software conferences. From the would you believe it department - here are two of the gems that I overheard in serious conversation : -
-Service oriented CMMI
- Process Focused Agile
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