Analyzing the drivers of the combination of lean and agile in software development companies

Abstract

Agile software development has been widely accepted by the software industry as a means for improving flexibility and innovation capabilities. More recently, lean thinking has emerged as a new paradigm to make software development more efficient. In practice, quite often lean is seen as an evolution of agile when agile is not considered to be enough. However, how they can relate to each other is not clearly understood. This paper presents the results of a survey study conducted among 408 software practitioners of 200 software intensive companies in Finland, which is one of the early adopters of lean for software development. The results highlight the interest of software professionals in adopting a combination of agile and lean paradigms, to achieve both flexibility and economical efficiency. Unlike manufacturing, the transformation is being actually conducted as a single trip where the borders between agile and lean are not clearly defined. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.