Lean and Agile
The relationship between Lean and Agile within the Agile community is controversial (like what isn’t?). Often the rhetoric suggests that this is a debate about Lean versus Agile, as if there is an either/or choice to make about which approach is inherently better. I believe that this is for the most part not only a false controversy but a bad way to frame the discussion.
Brent Barton often says that Agile is informed by lean thinking. He has some great examples and I’m going to see if I can get him to share some of these with us. Talking in the terms that Brent uses, I think is not only more accurate but also much more useful. Perhaps someone else could ask the question: how is Lean informed by Agile thinking? I’m not talking in a history of ideas sense but in a shared values sense.
From a history of ideas perspective, at least when it comes to Scrum, it’s hard to imagine a more qualified authority than Jeff Sutherland. In this blog post, Jeff talks about the origins of Scrum and makes clear that Scrum is not a direct descendant of Lean, although they share more than one common strand of DNA.