Poppendieck Seminar

Summary
Toyota Production System (Just In Time Manufacturing) applied to software

The other day Mary Poppendieck (author of “Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit”) gave a seminar at my company. It was an introduction to Lean Software Development and to “Portfolio Management”.

If you search Software Development Online for her name you’ll find a series of articles she wrote in 2001 with the suggestive subtitle: “Assembly-line production techniques apply to software, too”. I would normally not agree (I don’t like people trying to apply things like statistical process control to software), but I this case, I actually do agree!

It seems to be attempt to apply the ideas that Ohno came up with for his “Toyota Production System” to software development.