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How is it that Japanese manufacturing practices made such a deep impact on the Agile software development movement in the West (The New New Product Development
by azangru 4y ago
How is it that Japanese manufacturing practices made such a deep impact on the Agile software development movement in the West (The New New Product Development Game, Kaizen, Kanban, reduce muda, shu-ha-ri, etc. etc.), yet failed to improve work practices at home?
- Karunamon 4y agoIt sounds like the culture there leads to a lot of innovations being created that the same culture prevents from being implemented.
- dudeinjapan 4y agoKanban as originally used at Toyota was always used to coordinate pre-determined "production line" factory processes. It wasn't used for creative iteration in the way you see it used in a western software development context. Similarly, kaizen was all about continual factory process optimization, not optimization of a codebase through iterative refactoring. In fact, the mindset is very much "write the code once, never change it, and keep it running it forever basically without upgrades or patches." "Reduce muda" (we might say "reduce toil") is laughably out-of-place in Japanese software shops. To give an example, an acquaintance worked as "DevOps" at Rakuten. His job was to release new software versions by opening up 200 SSH terminal windows.
- jeofken 4y agoMaybe these software development philosophies are cargo cults