Agile's Frameworks  >  LEAN

LEAN Framework

5-Min Read

"Much of this waste reduction comes from Lean’s goal of a “kaizen” culture. Kaizen is a state of continuous improvement where people naturally look for ways to improve poorly performing practices." 
- Jim Benson

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LEAN

Lean is a set of managerial principles that were developed by Toyota in the 1950s to ensure efficiency and higher value in production. The original name was Lean Manufacturing but it was later applied in product and software development.

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Seven Core Principles of Lean

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1. Eliminate Waste

Waste is seen as work or any allocation of resources for a task that won’t bring any value to the customer. Waste should be identified and deleted.

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2. Build Quality in

Quality development should be at the heart of the product. Tests should be undertaken throughout the whole development process. Some iterations should be allocated to refactoring code to make it simpler, cleaner and easier to modify for the next upcoming features.

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3. Create Knowledge

Amplify learning by facilitating communication early and often, getting feedback as soon as possible, and building on what we learn. The Team should provide the infrastructure to properly document and retain valuable learning and value.  

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4. Delay Commitment

Decisions have to be made the latest possible. The Team should keep their options open while continuously gathering and collecting data and information to make the best decision at the very end, rather than planning and taking early, non-data backed-up calls.

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5. Deliver Fast

Identifying what slows the Team down and removing these blocks as well as working in iterative development to deliver value to the customer and maximize the Return on Investment as soon as possible.

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6. Respect for People

People should be empowered to make their own decisions in their own area of expertise. This ranges from new hires onboarding, through communication within the team to encouraging healthy conflicts. Micromanagement should be banned.

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7. Optimize the Whole

The product should not be the sum of its features but seen as a whole and encouraging clean, optimized code as well as perpetual improvement to create true value. 

The Lean Startup

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The Lean Startup is a book written by Eric Ries and published in 2011. It applies the original Lean principles to software product development in today's world and develops further concepts on how to build the best product that will actually bring value to its users.

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Lean Startup Product Development

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The core principle for Lean Startup Development is reducing waste by building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) -the smallest working product possible- to test your idea on the market, measure how users respond, validate ideas and develop the product further to bring more value.

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The cycle is commonly called BUILD - MEASURE - LEARN and is used as follow:

LEARN

IDEAS

BUILD

DATA

CODE

Split Tests

Customer Development

The 5 Whys

Customer Advisory Board

Falsifiable Hypotheses

Product Owner

Accountability

Customer Archetypes

Cross-functional Teams

Semi-autonomous Teams

Smoke Tests

LEARN FASTER

BUILD FASTER

Unit Tests

Usability Tests

Continuous Integration

Incremental Deployment

Free & Open-Source

Cloud Computing

Cluster Immune System

Just-in-Time Scalability

Refactoring

Developer Sandbox

Minimum Viable Product

MEASURE

MEASURE FASTER

MEASURE FASTER

Funnel Analysis

Cohort Analysis

Net Promoter Score

Search Engine Marketing

Predictive Monitoring

A/B Tests

Continuous Deployment

Usability Tests

Real-Time Monitoring

Customer Liaison