Lean Software Development Quotes

“Suppose a developer has a conversation with a customer about details of a feature. The conversation should not be considered complete until it is expressed as a customer test.”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“It may seem like writing tests slows down development; in fact, testing does not cost, it pays, both during development and over the system’s lifecycle.”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“the critical factor in motivation is not measurement,8 but empowerment: moving decisions to the lowest possible level in an organization while developing the capacity of those people to make decisions wisely.”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“No one has yet figured out how to manage people effectively into battle; they must be led,” wrote John Kotter”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“because the belief system has no doubt led to success in the past, so it will fight back with many varieties of self-fulfilling prophecies.”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“Resistance indicates a perceived threat to a largely unconscious belief system, one that has no doubt successfully guided the organization in the past.”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“Thus, fixed-price contracts tend to select the vendor most likely to get in trouble.”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“In a three-year period, we had 78 projects, and 77 of them were delivered on time, on budget, and in scope. Then I surveyed the customers and found out that none of them was happy!”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“However, if damaging behavior can be limited through the relationship rather than the contract, all manner of benefits in terms of speed, flexibility, cost, and information exchange can result. Unfortunately, these benefits are counterintuitive”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“When you try to measure performance, particularly the performance of knowledge workers, you’re positively courting dysfunction.”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“and so we persist in using suboptimized measurements out of superstition and habit.”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“Focusing exclusively on local measurements has a tendency to inhibit collaboration beyond the area being measured, because there is no reward for it.”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“He notes that the policies established to solve a problem will often exacerbate the problem, creating a downward spiral: As a problem gets worse, managers apply even more aggressively the very policies that are causing the problem.”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“If the vision of perceived integrity isn’t refreshed regularly, the engineers have a tendency to get lost in the technical details and forget the customer values.”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“A mature organization focuses on learning effectively and empowers the people who do the work to make decisions.”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“empowerment: moving decisions to the lowest possible level in an organization while developing the capacity of those people to make decisions wisely.”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“The simple mathematical fact working here is that variation is always amplified as it moves down a chain of connected events. A little variation in step one introduces a huge variation five steps later.”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“It is much more important to develop people with the expertise to make wise decisions than it is to develop decision-making processes that purportedly think for people. We are also convinced that it is quite possible to develop many people who are able to make wise intuitive decisions.”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“Frameworks should be extracted from a collection of successful implementations, not built on speculation.”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“premature design commitment is a design failure mode”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“Software rarely comes with a warranty. Let’s”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“Software rarely comes with a warranty.”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“it is easier to change a decision that hasn’t been made.”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“keep the constraints of the problem visible”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“resist the temptation to jump to a solution;”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“Set-based development means that you communicate constraints, not solutions.”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“A Standish Group study found that 45 percent of features in a typical system are never used and 19 percent are rarely used.”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit

“There are few endeavors in which it is more important to keep options open than in software development. In Chapter 3, “Decide as Late as Possible”
― Mary Poppendieck, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: An Agile Toolkit