What got lost in translation from Lean Manufacturing into Agile?
3 solomonb 3 5/7/2025, 9:30:12 PM
The Toyota System (Lean Manufacturing) is largely considered a fundamental revolution in manufacturing. Systems like 5S, continuous improvement, just in time production, Kanban (which is way more sophisticated in Lean then in software project management) etc have been demonstrated over and over again to be highly effective at improving factory production, employee satisfaction, and product quality.
As I understand it, Agile was an attempt to translate Lean Manufacturing from physical production to software development. I've seen some pretty incredible presentations on the benefits of Agile, particularly out of Spotify.
Yet I've never personally worked somewhere that I felt adopted Agile in a way that delivered on the promises and I've heard similar sentiments from many other people.
I have personally experienced the benefits of Lean methods even outside of a factory setting when organizing my home and workshop.
Is there something fundamentally different about physical production processes versus software development?
Agile itself as a set of principles is still invaluable. But it's been cargo-culted to death. The "agile" frameworks that exist today have been completely divorced from the principles. Tools like Jira are now so complicated and process driven that I would argue they are anti-Agile.
I think the key that makes process improvement work in manufacturing is that the production line is continuous, and the measuring of outcomes is independent. Car quality, customer satisfaction, units produced, mistakes, etc.
In software, the outcomes are often nebulous and unmeasured. There are not discrete, matching outputs over time. So management becomes obsessed with micro-managing and controlling the inputs. Ticketing, points, assignment, etc. Agile has become a system for creating dashboards more than outputting quality code.
Is that really true? I'm asking not debating, as I may have selection bias in how I observe Lean Manufacturing through the lens of small to mid size companies with active public relations via the internet.
> I think the key that makes process improvement work in manufacturing is that the production line is continuous, and the measuring of outcomes is independent. Car quality, customer satisfaction, units produced, mistakes, etc.
I think this makes a lot of sense. The products in software development are a lot more nebulous.
Put another way, lean manufacturing improves metrics for the margianal unit of goods. No one, customer or dev, is interested in the margianal unit of software.