Improving system development with lean
Ojaniemi, Laura (2018)
2018
Tietojohtaminen
Talouden ja rakentamisen tiedekunta - Faculty of Business and Built Environment
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Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2018-06-06
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tty-201805241844
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tty-201805241844
Tiivistelmä
The objective of this thesis was to study how lean principles can be applied in software development. The study includes literature review of lean principles, software development and how these have been combined. The study also has an empirical part where case company wants to improve their process efficiency in agile software development and how this could be done by implementing lean into their processes.
The case study included interviews with the employees from different parts of the process and a data-analysis. The interviews were analyzed to get a view of the current state of the processes, to find possible places where employees thought there could be wasteful steps and to find out what kind of suggestions or wishes the employees had in mind considering improvement to the processes. Then data-analysis was carried out to calculate median throughput times and to see which parts of development seemed to take the most time.
The results of interview analysis showed that there were multiple systems in use for different tasks and those were partly overlapping or there was a break in communication chain when data moved from system to another. The employees themselves considered this as waste and hoped for unified system that would not require copying data from one system to another. Other wastes found were waiting, resources in testing, poor communication, documentation and reporting. The results from data-analysis suggested that testing is a clear bottleneck and in the current processes of reporting defects have some issues in prioritizing tasks. These were also mentioned in the interviews.
As results we noted that taking more lean principles in use in the company would be helpful. It is suggested that the case company first defines their value to the customer and communicates this to the organization. Then the number of product configurations should be cut back to relieve the amount of testing. To decrease the interruptions in development, it was suggested to consider dividing the team in two, other can focus on iterative development and another using Kanban could take care of the urgent tasks coming up in the middle of a sprint.
The case study included interviews with the employees from different parts of the process and a data-analysis. The interviews were analyzed to get a view of the current state of the processes, to find possible places where employees thought there could be wasteful steps and to find out what kind of suggestions or wishes the employees had in mind considering improvement to the processes. Then data-analysis was carried out to calculate median throughput times and to see which parts of development seemed to take the most time.
The results of interview analysis showed that there were multiple systems in use for different tasks and those were partly overlapping or there was a break in communication chain when data moved from system to another. The employees themselves considered this as waste and hoped for unified system that would not require copying data from one system to another. Other wastes found were waiting, resources in testing, poor communication, documentation and reporting. The results from data-analysis suggested that testing is a clear bottleneck and in the current processes of reporting defects have some issues in prioritizing tasks. These were also mentioned in the interviews.
As results we noted that taking more lean principles in use in the company would be helpful. It is suggested that the case company first defines their value to the customer and communicates this to the organization. Then the number of product configurations should be cut back to relieve the amount of testing. To decrease the interruptions in development, it was suggested to consider dividing the team in two, other can focus on iterative development and another using Kanban could take care of the urgent tasks coming up in the middle of a sprint.