Lean production methods in modern software development

This paper shows that Extreme Programming (XP) is rooted in the principle of Lean Production. XP drastically slims down the development process, but adds extreme customer orientation end extreme ways of quality assurance to the process. The fact thar XP and other agile methods in modern software development are based on lean principles explains why agilemethods can produce high-quality software in a cost-effective way. The paper also contains a discussion of problems that come up when using XP in practice, and raises important questions about lean methods in software development; for example , whether lean methods scale to large software projects and large software organizations. When trying to answer such questions, software engineering could draw from experience with lean production and lean development in other fields.