lean app development: think big, act small, succeed fast
TRANSCRIPT
Lean App Development: Think Big, Act Small, Succeed Fast
Lean app development is a quickly emerging strategy for software development that brings
the swiftness and power ofagile software development to developing and marketing mobile
apps with reduced development cycles. This methodology originated from the philosophy of
lean manufacturing method for industries which was introduced by Henry Ford in 1920. And
introducing the lean manufacturing practices to the IT field is credited to Mary and Tom
Poppendieck when they published a book on mapping the manufacturing practices for
software development.
According to the lean principles the app development can be summarized into seven key
points, which are very close in concept to the traditional lean manufacturing principles. The
following seven lean principles have given shape to the modern agile app development
community by lending best agile practices to the app development:•Eliminate Waste
•Amplify Learning
•Decide As Late As Possible
•Deliver As fast As Possible
•Empower the Team
•Build Integrity In
•See the Whole/Big Picture
All the above seven lean principles are very tightly bound with each other and help the
development teams in ditching the software development overheads that needlessly
consume time such as project planning, contemplating hypothetical failure cases, and
negative testing. In fact all that does not add value to the customer is regarded as waste
which should be eliminated. Successful lean app development teams have come to eliminate
waste such as heavy functionality and unclear requirements to avoid unnecessary delays in
the software development cycles.
The ideology of the development team finely focuses on pushing the app into the market and
getting it in the hands of the consumers to know how the product holds up in the real world.
The customer feedback then helps the developers to identify the risks and prospects clearly
and hence improvise the app to the liking of their customers. This amplifies learning big time
as the developers are have updated knowledge of the ever so shifting market dynamics and
get their product perfectly in line with the real world business needs.
Furthermore, with the lean app development principles the uncertainties and crucial
decisions that depend on them are delayed until the very last moment. The lean app
development cycle iterations are quick and often, which allow the team to experiment more
and then decide upon the feature set, rather than spend enormous amounts of time in
project planning. The agile methodologies direct the practitioners in acting and not just
thinking. With bare minimal of thought process, wherein the team only clarify unanimously
and decide upon the tasks to be executed, the app development is actually kicked off during
every iteration. This gives the team maximum chances to eliminate failures and try new
things with minimum iterations. Additionally, not just one but all individuals in the team are
injected with the lean app development philosophies which empower them in bringing their
best on to the table, yet follow a logical process for assuring involvement of each member
thoroughly.
There are innumerable apps released on the wide array of smartphone marketplaces. With
more than 1000 app submissions to the Apple iStore alone the competitive market can easily
be judged to be very aggressive. And with a chance of less than 7% for any app to be
successful on the marketplace, the app publishers can afford no loss of time if their app
finishes on the gloomier side of the success rate graph. Lean app development helps the team
to push their apps into the market as early as possible to learn and understand the user
patterns, improvise the app, and shoot out an update to always stay ahead of the
competition. With repeated cycles of quick and often app updates the app developers can
guarantee themselves of increased market exposure and improved app performance every
time they push the update into the market.
Lean app development is a very exciting and fruitful game of strategies that powers the
development team to thrive and succeed regardless of the unreliable market analysis and
killing competition. The lean development thinking has to be well understood by all the
members of the team which helps the unit to “Think big, act small, fail fast; learn rapidly”.
With the lean app development strategy you can give yourself more chance to win big in
software development.
This post first appeared on Wired.com