Continuous, Lean, and Wasteless: Minimizing Lead Time from Development Done to Production Use
Timo Lehtonen, Terhi Kilamo, Sampo Suonsyrjä, Tommi Mikkonen · 2016
Modern software organizations invest substantial effort in building and automating their tool chain. The goal is to maximize both the speed of development, and how rapidly new software is deployed. This paper presents results from a descriptive and exploratory single case study from an ongoing project of Finnish company Solita. Based on data from version control and production logs, we investigate the feature flow in the project to study the effect of lean processes and the continuous deployment tool chain to waste produced by the deployment pipeline. We find that flow efficiency can be improved simply by minimizing the idle time the feature waits in the production process after its implementation has been finalized. This reduction of waste benefits both end users and developers -- the users get access to new features, and the developers receive timely feedback.