“#Agile” does not equal “#Lean” | Post Agilist http://ht.ly/IbLDc
Great and useful post distinguishing among terms often used in the same paragraph, sometimes the same sentence, and in the most egregious cases, as adjacent adjectives in a description. As Post Agilist points out – they’re not the same, and they don’t reinforce the same idea. Surface thinking and simple analogies don’t serve very well here.
People use lean methods to take out or reduce waste and thereby improve operational efficiency, especially related to repetitive tasks. Lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources.
People using agile methods apply a rapid-cycle do/ inspect/ adapt approach to execute tasks over short time periods, with frequent regular customer involvement, assessment and feedback, with the aim of making course-correcting changes quickly. Agile is a general “philosophy” of software development; scrum methods implement projects with a specific project-management method consistent with the agile philosophy.
Lots written on these two topics – and they MAY be approaches used together – but please, lets not bleed together and confuse them. Too much that is good will be lost; and many will fail to make critical distinctions. Your thoughts?