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What does the Toyota Production System look like when applied to software? This probably reduces down to: "what is waste in software dev, and how to we COMPLETELY ERADICATE IT?"

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hal

@halhod

Jul 17, 2020

because, posit (I am moron who has not done written software and knows little about it), i feel like SWE is a cottage industry atm and that it's both holding back the digital economy and enflaming geopolitical tension over who develops what app

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Cedric Chin

@ejames_c

Jul 18, 2020

Marie and Tom Poppendieck's 2002 book, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit contains the original attempt to answer that question. But I don't think their methods (or Ohno's ideas) have spread very far.

Cedric Chin

@ejames_c

It's worth asking if TPS may ever be applied to software. Toyota demands something called 'production levelling'. That means small batch sizes — so they don't overcommit to a production run — but within that run, everything is predictable. You can't do that in software.

2:34 PM · Jul 18, 2020Twitter Web App

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Counterpoint: the authors of Accelerate (goodreads.com/en/book/show/3) argue that it's possible, but only in the delivery portion of the software dev cycle.

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I've always been confused about how strong people think the analogy is between building cars and building computer programs. There are some similarities, but software is not a widget factory and we don't generally ask programmers to write the same line of code 100x/day...

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and

Engineers very frequently build the wrong thing. Toyota factories hardly ever go "whoops this was supposed to be a Prius but ended up a Corolla"

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