Austin’s Lean Software Development community looks at the ingrained analogies to manufacturing that continue to lead software efforts into blind alleys – with special attention to analogies that are so deeply embedded that we often fail to recognize them. We’ll look at why product development theory provides a clearer understanding of software development, and how we can even be misguided by product development perspectives that are particular to manufactured products.

This presentation looks at how damaging the ingrained manufacturing perspectives are to software development, shaping our management and process beliefs, obscuring effective engineering techniques, and consistently setting unrealistic expectations that are usually only fulfilled by chance. We’ll look at product development theory as a more practicable body of knowledge for software development, both in terms of management and engineering. Contemporary software methods such as Lean and Agile, as well as prior methods will be framed in terms of product development, and software development productivity problems will be laid out in terms of perspectives that have been informed by misguided analogies to manufacturing.

Even though you have a software development production line in your shop, and even though you’re producing software engines and machines, software development isn’t manufacturing by any practicable means. Come to this frank presentation and discussion to learn to recognize the misconceptions that are hurting your chances for software development success, and to see how Lean Software Development takes an entirely different approach to software development that is free from Lean Manufacturing shackles.