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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
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
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
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.
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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.
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Ben Kuhn
@benskuhn
Replying to
@ejames_c
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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Ben Kuhn
@benskuhn
Replying to
@ejames_c
I think your point that TPS is about eliminating waste actually explains the disanalogy: in cars, the design is already finalized so optimizing production is the most important thing. In software, getting the design (both UX+tech) right is way more important than efficiency.
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