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Mary Poppendieck at CAMUG

I went to see Mary Poppendieck, of “Lean Development” fame at CAMUG last night. Good speaker with a lot of good ideas about how to make software development processes more valuable and less wasteful. She has quite a bit of experience in the manufacturing industry which is applicable to software development.

Key Thoughts:

  • You can’t be sloppy if you want to go fast.
  • Empower and respect workers as intelligent independant decision makers.
  • Build only what is needed.
  • Optimize the system as a whole, not the parts of the system individually. This applies both to the software being built and the software development processes being used to build it.
  • Minimize inventory, which in software development means minimize undeployed software.

Poppendieck definately has a lot of good knowledge to share. I read her book sometime last year and I highly recommend it, if for no other reason than to read how the Japanese kicked American butt when it came to revolutionizing manufacturing processes.