What do Google and SharedBook have in common? Read along and find out…
After releasing quite a few projects in a row (Open API, data integrations with CarePages.com and Sportography.com, enhanced image processing, and much more) we are now concentrating on defining the next set of projects and new features to our technology.
Deciding what to tackle next, how to do it most effectively, what we’re going to implement (and more over – what we are not going to implement) is an ever challenging task. We keep trying to look for how we can deliver the best value to our clients, while not getting carried away (at the expense of time to market). Trying to always keep an eye on the big picture, while making sure each feature and task receives detailed attention. And when I say “we,” I mean the entire team from management to our developers, who have an important role in the detailed design of the features they are responsible for. Challenging!
What helps us face this challenge is a set of a few important principles we follow regularly. Recently we found out that these have a name: Lean software development. These principles include among others: empowering the team (I already mentioned the importance of having good people in my previous blog post, of course that doesn’t help unless you allow them to use their full potential), strong focus on priorities (waste elimination in lean terminology) to make sure we only spend time on adding real customer value, and others. One fresh example of that, just from this week: two of our key developers analyzed a new design for part of our system. Two days later they came back with a recommendation to cancel the project for now. Reason: it was a great design (every programmer would love implementing it) but it would not deliver real value to customers. You can imagine how proud I was!
And now to answer my question from the start of this post: a few months ago I came across an interesting blog post from Carlos E. Perez about the way Google adopted lean development practices as well (check out The Lean Nature of Google's Development Practices).
Lean development has a lot more to it and our development process uses additional principles, which I will leave for my next posts.
If you are interested in learning more about lean development checkout: Lean software development, Agile vs. Lean, great blog by Frode Odegard, Mark Windholtz: Lean Software Development, expect zero defects and of course Wikipedia.
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