Applying Lean to Improve Quality in Software Development Projects

As the role of IT shifts from being a cost center to building the core value proposition, it becomes crucial to ensure the quality of the delivered software solutions. While lean has become a standard approach in manufacturing, supply chain management and other domains, software development has been dominated by Agile. Delivering fast has been a central focus of IT industry and much too often the software quality has been compromised in favor of speed. There has been an assumption that it is possible either to deliver the product fast or in a good quality, which is challenged in this paper. This action research examines the impact of applying lean methods to software development project; study has been done by comparing two projects where lean implementation has been triggered in one of the project teams. The result shows that despite the common belief of productivity shrinking with increasing quality, it is possible to deliver high quality products without compromising the delivery speed.