- The business is demanding more features at an increasing pace. It is expecting your development teams to keep up with its changing needs while maintaining high quality.
- However, your development process is broken. Tasks are taking significant time to complete, and development handoffs are not smooth.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Lean development is independent of your software development lifecycle (SDLC) methodology. Lean development practices can be used in both Agile and Waterfall teams.
- Lean isn’t about getting rid of sound development processes. Becoming lean means fine-tuning the integration of core practices like coding and testing.
- Lean thinking motivates automation. By focusing on optimizing the development process, automation becomes a logical and necessary step toward greater maturity and improved throughput.
Impact and Result
- Gain a deep understanding of lean principles and associated behaviors. Become familiar with the core lean principles and the critical attitudes and mindsets required by lean. Understand how incorporating DevOps and Agile principles can help your organization.
- Conduct a development process and tool review. Use a value-stream analysis of your current development process and tools to reveal bottlenecks and time-consuming or wasteful tasks. Analyze these insights to identify root causes and the impact to product delivery.
- Incorporate the right tools and practices to become more lean. Optimize the key areas where you are experiencing the most pain and consuming the most resources. Look at how today’s best development and testing practices (e.g. version control, branching) and tools (e.g. automation, continuous integration) can improve the throughput of your delivery pipeline.
Improve Application Development Throughput Research & Tools
Start here – read the Executive Brief
Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should make development teams leaner, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:
- Improve Application Development Throughput – Phases 1-3
1. Conduct a current state analysis
Acquire a holistic perspective of the development team, process, and tools to identify the bottlenecks and inefficiency points that are significantly delaying releases.
- Improve Application Development Throughput – Phase 1: Conduct a Current State Analysis
- Lean Implementation Roadmap Template
- Lean Development Readiness Assessment
2. Define the lean future state
Identify the development guiding principles and artifact management practices and build automation and continuous integration processes and tools that best fit the context and address the organization’s needs.
- Improve Application Development Throughput – Phase 2: Define the Lean Future State
3. Create an implementation roadmap
Prioritize lean implementation initiatives in a gradual, phased approach and map the critical stakeholders in the lean transformation.
- Improve Application Development Throughput – Phase 3: Create an Implementation Roadmap
Workshop: Improve Application Development Throughput
Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
1 Conduct a Current State Analysis
The Purpose
Assess the current state of your development environment.
Select a pilot project to demonstrate the value of your optimization.
Key Benefits Achieved
Realization of the root causes behind the bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your current development process.
Valuation of your current development tools.
Selection of a pilot project that will be used to gather the metrics in order obtain buy-in for wider optimization initiatives.
Activities
1.1 Assess your readiness to transition to lean development.
1.2 Conduct a SWOT analysis and value-stream assessment of your current development process.
1.3 Evaluate your development tools.
1.4 Select a pilot project.
Outputs
Lean development readiness assessment
Current state analysis of development process
Value assessment of existing development tools
Pilot project selection
2 Define Your Lean Future State
The Purpose
Establish your development guiding principles.
Enhance the versioning and management of your development artifacts.
Automatically build and continuously integrate your code.
Key Benefits Achieved
Grounded and well-understood set of guiding principles that are mapped to development tasks and initiatives.
Version control strategy of development artifacts, including source code, adapted to support lean development.
A tailored approach to establish the right environment to support automated build, testing, and continuous integration tools.
Activities
2.1 Assess your alignment to the lean principles.
2.2 Define your lean development guiding principles.
2.3 Define your source code branching approach.
2.4 Define your build automation approach.
2.5 Define your continuous integration approach.
Outputs
Level of alignment to lean principles
Development guiding principles
Source code branching approach
Build automation approach.
Continuous integration approach
3 Create Your Implementation Roadmap
The Purpose
Prioritize your optimization initiatives to build an implementation roadmap.
Identify the stakeholders of your lean transformation.
Key Benefits Achieved
Phased implementation roadmap that accommodates your current priorities, constraints, and enablers.
Stakeholder engagement strategy to effectively demonstrate the value of the optimized development environment.
Activities
3.1 Identify metrics to gauge the success of your lean transformation.
3.2 List and prioritize your implementation steps.
3.3 Identify the stakeholders of your lean transformation.
Outputs
List of product, process, and tool metrics
Prioritized list of tasks to optimize your development environment
Identification of key stakeholders