Lean is about two major goals: delivering the most value over time, and improving workflow. They can be stated together as, “Lean seeks the highest level of business value realization in the shortest amount of time in a predictable and sustainable manner.”
The Lean goals are universal: They apply to any field, not just software. They differ from traditional goals of development organizations before Lean, which were focused on maximizing utilization and productivity, which experience has shown leads to producing less real value. That is why Lean has superceded tradition.
Lean-Agile is a set of practices (or “disciplines”) that contribute to achieving the goals of greater value and better flow. Some of these practices evolved apart from Lean. Others have come directly from Lean and Agile (which developed later than and independently of Lean, but has many similarities). In the menu at left we group some of the practices most directly associated with the evolution of Lean, under “Lean Principles and Practices.”
Practices are different than goals in that goals are more general and relatively long-lived, while the choice and implementation of practices depends on the organization’s situation. Even a major practice like Architecture only applies where the amount of structure and interrelatedness is significant. In many cases a given practice has alternatives among which the Lean-Agile organization can choose.
Nevertheless, all Lean-Agile practices when used correctly and in an appropriate situation will contribute to increased value, smoother flow, or both.
All resources in the Disciplines and Practices Library
About the Lean-Agile Portal (Article)
Acceptance Test-Driven Development (Article)
Acceptance Test-Driven Development (Example) (Article)
Acceptance Test-Driven Development: A Quick Introduction (Blog Entry)
Agile Practices Every Developer Can Do To Help Their Team (Article)
Agile Product Management | FLEX from Product Management to the Team (Article)
Agile at Mid-Scale (Article)
Alternatives to Scrum of Scrums (Article)
Are We Using Automated Acceptance Tests? (Article)
Avoiding Over and Under Design in Agile Projects (Webinar Session) (Article)
Benefits of Acceptance Test-Driven Development using Behavior-Driven Development (Article)
Business Value, the Forgotten Goal (Webinar Session) (Article)
Capability (Article)
Carry-Over Work (Article)
Choosing Requirement Format (Article)
Common Challenges Faced by Teams New to Scrum, Remedies to These Challenges, and Related FAQs (Article)
Continuous Improvement (Article)
Contrasting the Daily Scrum with Kanban's Daily Retrospective (Article)
Controlling Work-in-Process (WIP) (Article)
Cross-Functional Teams: Improving Communication Between People who Work Together (Case Study) (Article)
Daily Standups (Article)
Decomposing Requirements (Article)
Decomposing a Capability Into MBIs (Article)
Decomposing a Feature Into Stories (Article)
Decomposing an MBI into Features (Article)
Defining MBIs Pattern Group (Article)
Designing the Kanban Board (Article)
Do We Have So Much Technical Debt That We Need to Pay Some Down Before Proceeding? (Article)
Do We Push, Plan or Pull Our Work? (Article)
Dynamic Feature Teams: Creating Small Mobs Within a Large Group (Case Study) (Article)
Estimation (Article)
Flowing Within a Time-box (Article)
Focus on Finishing Stories in the Sprint and on Finishing MBIs in the Business Increment (Article)
Further Information on Leanban (Article)
Getting Started with Team-Agility or Scrum (Article)
Go for Understandable, Not Simple (Article)
Going Beyond Scrum, Part 1 (Blog Entry)
Going Beyond Scrum, Part 2 (Blog Entry)
Guardrails (Article)
Guardrails for the Team and Agile Coach (Scrum/Kanban Master) (Article)
How Can We Deliver the Most Value from Available Resources? (Blog Entry)
How Do We Align People / Teams to the Work To Be Done? (Article)
How Do We Ensure There Is a Focus on Finishing? (Article)
How Does Agile at Scale Increase the Delivery of Business Value? (Blog Entry)
How Easily Can We Import a Lean or Agile Framework Into the Organization? (Blog Entry)
How Is Integration Across Teams Being Handled? (Article)
How Is Work Within the Program Being Sequenced? (Article)
How Lean Thinking Helps Scrum (Article)
How Should We Coordinate Teams? (Article)
How Should We Manage the Number of Items in the Portfolio? (Article)
How Should Work at the Portfolio Level Be Sequenced? (Article)
How Should the Intake Process Be Controlled? (Article)
How Small Are Our Stories? (Article)
How Will Architectural Capabilities Be Handled? How Will Architecture Be Prioritize Against Business Needs? (Article)
How Will DevOps Be Involved? (Article)
How Will Shared Services Be Handled? (Article)
How Will Tactical Work Be Handled? (Article)
How Will Teams Work and Deliver Together? (Article)
How Will UX Work With the Teams? (Article)
How Will We Create Visibility Throughout the Program? (Article)
How Will We Express, Decompose and Validate Requirements? (Article)
How Will We Make Visible Our Work at the Program Level? (Article)
How Will We Make the Work at the Portfolio Level Visible? (Article)
How to Adopt Scrum Effectively (Article)
How to Decide Whether to Start with ATDD or TDD (Article)
How to Ruin a Software Development Organization by Focusing on Throughput (Article)
How to Start with ATDD using BDD (Article)
How to Use Estimates (Article)
How to Use Scrum in Mid to Large Scale Organizations (Article)
Identifying Classes of Service (Article)
If We Do Estimate, What Estimation Method Should We Use? (Article)
Impediments to Progress and Quality (Article)
Improve Scrum with Leanban (Article)
Improve the Efficiency of the Technology Group (Article)
Is Scrum applicable for your team? (Article)
Issues With Quality (Article)
Iteration 0 - Conduct (Article)
Iteration 0 - Facilitate (Article)
Iteration Planning Meeting (Article)
Iteration Planning Meeting - Facilitate (Article)
Iteration Retrospective - Conduct (Article)
Iteration Retrospective - Facilitate (Article)
Justifying TDD (Blog Entry)
Lean-Agile Coach Library (Article)
Lean-Agile Product Management (Article)
Lean-Agile Team Checklists (Article)
Leanban in Depth (Article)
Meetings for Lean-Agile (Article)
Metrics (Article)
Net Objectives View of Scrum (Article)
Product Demonstration and Review - Facilitate (Article)
Product Demonstration and Review - Plan (Article)
Product Owner Library (Article)
Product Planning and Review - Conduct (Article)
Program Level (Article)
Recommended Resources - Facilitation (Article)
Resistance is Not to Change (Article)
Resources for Agile Coaches (Article)
Running Effective Planning Events (Article)
Scrum (Article)
Scrum and Mid-Scale Case Studies (Article)
Scrum as Example (Article)
Scrum by Example (Blog Entry)
Scrum of Scrums (Article)
Scrum-But: Management interrupts us all of the time with needed new functionality (Article)
Should We Estimate Our Work? (Article)
Skills that Developers Need to Acquire in an Agile Transformation (Blog Entry)
Starting With Kanban (Article)
Teaching Scrum by concentrating on Agile practices (Article)
Team Agility / Scrum Support System (Article)
Team Agility Templates Available (Article)
Team Estimation (Article)
Technology Delivery Manager Library (Article)
Templates for Team Agility (Premium Content) (Article)
Test-Driven Development: ATDD and UTDD (Article)
Test-First at the Team (Article)
Tester Library (Article)
The Dot Game (Article)
The Importance and Myth of “Consistency” (Article)
The Learning Philosophy of Team Agility (Article)
The Need to Improve Clarity of a Requirement (Article)
The Net Objectives Program Board Builder (Article)
The Role of the Business Analyst in an Agile World (Article)
To What Extent Will Test-First Methods Be Used? (Article)
To What Extent Will We Automate Tests? (Article)
Types of Tests for Code (Article)
Using Visual Controls (Article)
We do Scrum-but: We don’t estimate because it takes too long or management beats us up. (Article)
What Design Method Will Be Used? (Article)
What Framework / Method / Approach Are We Using? (Article)
What Is It That Can Make SAFe® Heavy? (Blog Entry)
What Is the Budgeting Cycle? (Article)
What Is the Ecosystem Structure at the Team Level? (Article)
What Makes an Organization "Mid-sized" (or Above)? (Blog Entry)
What Roles Are Missing? Which Roles Need To Be Redefined? (Article)
What Should Team Process(es) Be: Scrum, Kanban, Leanban? (Article)
What Should the Planning Cycle Be? (Article)
What Test Harness for Acceptance Tests Will Be Used? (Article)
When, Why and How to Estimate (Article)
Why Is SAFe Popular? (Blog Entry)
Why Looking at Delay Is So Important (Article)
Why You Should Grow Your Own Scrum Masters Instead of Bringing in Outside Scrum Masters (Article)
Why You Should Rethink How You Are Trained in Scrum (Article)
Will We Focus on Improving People or Improving the System? (Article)
Writing Explicit Policies (Article)
Writing Tasks (Article)
Writing a Capability (Article)
