Building lean thinking in a telecom software development organization: strengths and challenges

Abstract

The potential shown by Lean in different domains has aroused interest in the software industry. However, it remains unclear how Lean can be effectively applied in a domain such as software development that is fundamentally different from manufacturing. This paper explores how Lean principles are implemented in software development companies and the challenges that arise when applying Lean Software Development. For that, a case study was conducted at Ericsson R&D Finland, which successfully adopted Scrum in 2009 and subsequently started a comprehensible transition to Lean in 2010. Focus groups were conducted with company representatives to help devise a questionnaire supporting the creation of a Lean mindset in the company {Team Amplifier). Afterwards, the questionnaire was used in 16 teams based in Finland, Hungary and China to evaluate the status of their transformation. By using Lean thinking, Ericsson R&D Finland has made important improvements to the quality of its products, customer satisfaction and transparency within the organization. The study makes two main contributions to research. First, the main factors that have enabled Ericsson R&D's achievements are analysed. Elements such as 'network of product owners', 'continuous integration', 'work in progress limits' and 'communities of practice' have been identified as being of fundamental importance. Second, three categories of challenges in using Lean Software Development were identified: 'achieving flow', 'transparency' and 'creating a learning culture'.

Large-scale agile transformation at Ericsson: a case study

“…The literature review supported this approach (Dikert et al 2016) as several companies reported that customization of the agile approach is an evolutionary process, see e.g. (Rodríguez et al 2013;Ryan and Scudiere 2008).…”

“…Two of the papers (Abdelnour-Nocera and Sharp 2007; reporting on the same case concentrated on the effects of the agile transformation. A study about Ericsson R&D Finland (Rodríguez et al 2013) 2 focused on how Lean thinking is implemented, however the focus was mostly on the current state instead of the transformation process. A paper from Nokia Siemens Networks (Korhonen 2012) studied whether the visibility, reaction speed, quality, or motivation had changed, comparing the situation before and after the transformation.…”

“…The organization had three dedicated teams working on implementing CI, a known good practice reported in other large-scale agile transformations (Beavers 2007;Fry and Greene 2007;Gat 2006). This amounted to a significant investment in getting CI working, also reported in (Gat 2006;Moore and Spens 2008;Rodríguez et al 2013). As implementing CI requires not only suitable tools, but also a change in the mindset of developers, e.g., to start implementing automated tests for new code, a series of CI roadshows were organized.…”

Enhancing Lean Software Development by using Devops Practices

“…On the other hand, Shahid Mujtaba identify waste-related problems in a software product customization process by using value stream maps (VSM) [18] but they did not provide empirical evaluation of value stream maps in the software engineering. Pilar Rodríguez [19] presented some of challenges when applying Lean Software Development as achieving flow, transparency and creating a learning culture but unfortunately did not elaborate on ways to overcome these challenges. Henrik Jonsson [20] provided a framework for lean software development but he did not provide empirical evidences.…”

Lessons learned on applying design science for bridging the collaboration gap between industry and academia in empirical software engineering

“…Specifically, we illustrate our experiences through two case studies conducted in collaboration with Ericsson and Elektrobit in which a similar design science framework was applied ( [8] and [9]). The context of our on-going research is the adoption of Lean Software Development by software intensivecompanies.…”