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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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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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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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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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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Absolutely not. I'm not fully versed on the latest literature, but the authors of Accelerate (goodreads.com/en/book/show/3) actually argue something similar.
Use TPS/Lean ideas on the deployment of software, but ignore for the initial 'exploratory' part of a dev cycle.
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They call this the design/delivery split of software development cycles, and prefer to measure time from commit to deployment to production.
I've not actually put this to practice, so I can't say how well this works, nor what is needed to get it to work.
