> At the time, software development was suffering from a mistaken belief: that building things fast and building things well were fundamentally opposed. Mary kn

> At the time, software development was suffering from a mistaken belief: that building things fast and building things well were fundamentally opposed. Mary knew this to be untrue from her work in product development and manufacturing, where the ‘lean’ practices that sprung up in Japanese car factories and subsequently spread across the globe often ruled the day. If that's part of the original reasoning, then it was very random. R&D has not much to do with manufacturing. So I would greatly prefer an actual example from "product development" rather than car factories... I mean what build our software is e.g. gcc. I don't know if gcc is feeling lean, and actually I don't care much :)