IT-eye

There was an interesting piece about Toyota in a major dutch newspaper yesterday: Nieuwe Henry Ford is Japans (New Henry Ford is Japanese). Of course this has everything to do with the fact that Toyota has become the worlds biggest car producer. It’s about Kiichiro Toyoda who is responsible for Toyota’s production system, which is seen as big an improvement as Henry Ford’s moving assembly line. Toyota’s method for producing cars is called The Toyota Production System, which focuses, among other things, on eliminating waste, and just in time production (There’s a lot more to it). But Toyota has also made a large contribution in improving product development. The article also mentions that a large number of companies have adapted the Toyota way, or lean as it’s often called, of developing and producing products.

How does this relate to the software industry? You often read or hear that the software industry is immature and could learn a lot from other industries. So this is what we try to do. We copy from other industries. For example, the use of design patterns has had a positive impact on software development. But sometimes we copy the wrong practices. One example in my opinion is the assembly line. Assembly lines were invented by Ford to mass produce exact copies of a product. In the IT industry were are not mass producing exact copies. Every project I’ve done was different. Every customer wants a solution that is tailor made. Every customer has a different infrastructure. An with each new project, frameworks and tools have improved. So in fact we are not mass producing, we are doing product development. So i don’t understand why some companies are trying to create an assembly line for software development.

Too often IT people think product development consist of writing design documents. One group will write some design documents (product development) and then another group will create the actual software (production). A thing we could learn from other industries is that product development isn’t finished until you have at least one finished and tested product. And to achieve this you’ll probably have to create a lot of testable prototypes (or computer models and artist impressions), otherwise you can’t evaluate the correctness of your design. No feedback means you can’t improve your design based on real tests. Too often we try to assess the correctness of design documents using experience, knowledge and common sense. But this is no substitute for testing. I think customers will stay unhappy with the performance of the IT industry until we include testing in our designs. This is why iterative and lean software development make a lot of sense.

What do you think? Are we copying the right practices from other industries? Are other industries actually doing a better job than the IT industry?

More info:
* Implementing Lean Software Development
* Lean Software Development
* Product Development for the Lean Enterprise
* The Toyota Product Development System
* Agile Software Development with SCRUM
* Agile Project Management with Scrum