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Applying lean to application development and maintenance

MAY 2007 • Noah B. Kindler, Vasantha Krishnakanthan, and Ranjit Tinaikar

Sidebar: Software-development productivity: Traditional methods
Exhibit 1: The time-tested principles of lean manufacturing can be applied to rooting out and eliminating waste from the application-development and maintenance production process.
Exhibit 2: Companies can reduce application-development and maintenance costs by up to 40 percent.
Exhibit 3: An analysis of the steps in the application-development process reveals opportunities for improving productivity by up to 50 percent.

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	Software-development productivity: Traditional methods Over the past three decades, organizations have tried various methods to boost productivity in application development. Those efforts can be grouped into three categories: Process. Standards from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and Carnegie Mellon’s Capability Maturity Model (CMM) index help organizations to improve quality by following uniform processes. They address one of the drivers of waste in application development: process inconsistency. CMM and other standards don’t address other sources of waste, such as ineffective alignment between business and IT, the unavailability of the right resource at the right time, or architectural complexity. Metrics. Measuring function points assumes that the output of any application-development project can be standardized in much the same way as businesses measure productivity—for instance, the volume of calls an agent can handle or the number of applications a loan agent can process. While such metrics may be helpful in environments with stable frameworks (say, embedded-systems development or mature and well-documented applications), they don’t measure the waste that can occur in the early stages of development, such as the definition and design of requirements. Technology. Techniques such as computer-aided software engineering (CASE) can help eliminate wasteful...