Industrial Engineering Insights on Variance in the Software Development Process1
Peter Middleton, James Sutton · Productivity Press eBooks · 2020
This chapter seeks to demonstrate that there are strong similarities between a manufacturing job shop and a software development operation. Creating software requires a product development system that must deal with multiple tasks simultaneously. Lean principles are already being successfully applied to improving the complex product development process for cars, it is therefore a small step to apply them to software development. Once software development is visualized as a process, proven industrial engineering techniques can show how to create a lean process. Software development is typically highly cyclical with lots of variation, which is the reason for slow throughput time. The implication is that the way to improve software developer performance is to record and analyze all reasons contributing to performance variances. Releasing large amounts of work at one time into the software development system will cause queues to develop, thus reducing system capacity. Work should be released in small units at regular intervals.