A more pragmatic approach to discussing the relationship between Lean and Agile is to ask when one approach might be better suited than the other to solve a particular kind of problem.

The relationship between Lean and Agile within the Agile community is controversial. This is for the most part not only a false controversy but a bad way to frame the discussion.

Scrum is an empirical process. This means that the Scrum team will try many experiments during each sprint, and will form hypotheses during their sprint retrospective. The team will do some great things, and continue to improve upon them. It will also make many mistakes, and will learn from them by trying more experiments. As long as the team continues to take action by trying new things and learning from those attempts, it will get better

I’ve been through the grinder on build tools: typing in VIC-20 BASIC, building from the command line, building from .sh scripts, building from make, building from xmake, building from IDEs, building from nant. It’s been a glorious twenty-eight years of software development (including grade school years of software development).

Agile is going to have a PR problem.