- ISBN13: 9780596517311
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
This succinct book explains how you can apply the practices of Lean software development to dramatically increase productivity and quality. Based on techniques that revolutionized Japanese manufacturing, Lean principles are being applied successfully to product design, engineering, the supply chain, and now software development. With The Art of Lean Software Development, you’ll learn how to adopt Lean practices one at a time rather than taking on the entire methodol… More >>
The Art of Lean Software Development
Tags: Development, Lean, Software
#1 by Oscar Azmitia on April 4, 2010 - 8:12 pm
This book focuses on explaining methods on how you can apply the practices of lean software development. I liked it because it is very specific, and it dives right in. Its not a very large book and you can read it just a few hours and learn enough from it to guide you and explain techniques to make lean software that works efficiently.
Rating: 4 / 5
#2 by Ira Laefsky on April 4, 2010 - 9:28 pm
In a brief 128 pages, this Afternoon Read provides an excellent introduction, or review of everything that has happened in Software Development since about 1970, when Royce’s Waterfall Model was the dominant view of how to efficiently engineer software. It describes the relationship between Lean Software Development models and developments in the Japanese manufacturing industry, describes the major distinction between Lean and Agile Development practices, as well as those of XP, SCRUM, etc. In addition to the high-level business/software development strategies, that are contrasted, this succinct introduction to modern Software Engineering Practices, provides basic instruction in six modern development methods which have streamlined and regularized this industry.
These are:
1.Source Code Management/Revision Control Systems
2.Automated Testing
3.Continuous Integration
4.Less Code/Refactoring
5.Short Iterations
6.Customer Participation
This compact summary of Modern Software Development Practices is perhaps
best directed to someone new to significant development efforts (perhaps
someone who has taken isolated programming and data structure courses), or needs a review of modern practices before choosing a methodology for a particular significant development effort. It is the very best summary of current Software Engineering that can be read in a few hours.
–Ira Laefsky
Rating: 5 / 5
#3 by Curt Hibbs on April 4, 2010 - 11:15 pm
I am one of the authors of this book and I just wanted tell you about who this book was written for and who it was not written for.
If you are already well versed in either Lean or Agile software development, this book is NOT for you.
If, however, you know little or nothing about Lean and Agile software development, but you’ve hearing the buzz about them and you want to know more without having to read a 500 page tome, this book is for you.
This book is intended to introduce you to the most of the important topics in the world of Lean and Agile software development, provide some concrete guidance on what is most important, and give you references to allow you to dig deeper in each topic.
If you are part of that target audience, please let me know what you think of the book.
Thanks,
Curt Hibbs
Rating: 4 / 5
#4 by Eric Jain on April 4, 2010 - 11:48 pm
Being familiar with “agile” methods, I wanted to get a better idea of what “lean” software development is all about. This book does a good job of explaining concepts such as Kanban and Kaizen, at least at a high level. But most of the book discusses “concrete practices” such as source code management and automated testing which could come straight out of any book on software development. I was surprised that only the last chapter focused on practices specific to lean software development. Don’t expect much detail from a book this size; as the authors themselves state at one point: “It’s hard to be specific about this because what makes sense and what will work for you is highly dependent upon the context.”
Rating: 3 / 5
#5 by James Holmes on April 5, 2010 - 1:46 am
This is a concise work weighing in at around 120 pages. Its point is to give people a 30,000 foot overview of many things relating to Lean software development, and it’s absolutely targeted to technical and business decision makers who are trying to learn a bit about how they can benefit from Lean.
The problem with the book’s approach is that the authors fly past points so quickly that there’s not enough serious discussion of the crucial topics central to Lean. I also think the authors spent the majority of the book covering topics which aren’t specific to Lean. I’m all over source control, continuous integration, test driven design/development, etc., but these are fundamentals for many other methodologies or approaches. The authors don’t spend enough time hitting hard the concepts of eliminating waste, value stream mapping, tight cycles, etc.
Worse yet, in the authors’ attempts to give only high-level coverage of concepts they do a bad job of describing some critical issues. As an example, I screamed, literally, when I found this passage in their section on Reuse Existing Software:
“Software reuse exists in many different forms, each of which affects codebase size differently:
* Copying source code from one component to another reduces coding time and debugging, but it actually increases codebase size.”
Dudes. Really. Copy and Paste development is awful for so many reasons. An increase in codebase size is utterly the last issue you should be talking about when discussing why you should never do it. Instead, focus on the impact of copy/paste on code complexity, violation of DRY principles, the loss of clarity, increased dependencies, and the replication of bugs throughout your codebase.
This isn’t an awful book, and the authors generally did a good job laying out the material. I also loved that they included a good intro to Kanban. The problem is a lack of focus and a sacrifice of vital information in an attempt to turn an introduction to Lean into some sort of 30 minute infomercial.
Rating: 2 / 5