An Empirical Investigation of Applying Lean Production to Software Development and IT Services: Outcomes, Challenges, and Lessons Learned

Abstract

Lean principles for software development are relatively new, and their applications in software organizations are yet to be established. Software-centric organizations should be warned that transferring Lean principles and best practices from other industries is not a straightforward process; it is complex and requires reinvention and reinterpretation of practices in these new contexts. What are the applicable Lean principles to software organizations? What do they mean in the context of software development and IT services? What is required to implement these principles? What are the application strategies that practitioners have reported in the available literature? How can these strategies be better implemented? Many more questions have been answered throughout real-life field studies that spanned over more than a 5-year period, where various and mixed methodological approaches were employed, including action research and ethnographic methods. The principle goal of this thesis has been to empirically investigate how software organizations can realize the value that could be brought by the application of the Lean principles in software-centric and IT services contexts.