Mary Poppendieck on "Lean Software Development"

During my discussion with Gloria Mark last Thursday about multitasking work habits (see below), I mentioned a concept I learned from one of Mary Poppendieck's lectures at the Software Development West 2003 conference. The lecture was from her new book, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit. In a nutshell, the book takes a whole slew of best practices that have been used in manufacturing for decades (collectively known as "lean manufacuring"), and applies them to software development. In chapter 1, Poppendieck introduces us to the "7 wastes of manufacturing" and proposes a way to map each of them to software development. One of these wastes is extraneous movement (e.g. when a tool crib is too far away from the position on the assembly line where the tools are often used), and Poppendieck likens it to extraneous task-switching on the part of a software developer. Every time a developer has to "ramp up" and "ramp down," she says, it's a sunk cost. I think it's quite interesting, therefore, that Professor Mark's research shows that Poppendieck is fighting an uphill battle on this front, since everyone's natural tendency is to switch tasks often.