Agile Software Development and Deming

Part two of three of an interview of me with Bill Fox has been published. See part one: John Hunter on PDSA, Deming and Strategy. From part two, Lean, Agile, Deming, Leadership and Management Systems:

I see that agile is very consistent with Deming. Agile has all sorts of variants, so to different extents, they fit in. But one of the things I find really interesting is the agile folks, and of course the lean software folks, they much more than any other group of people I’ve seen traced the agile ideas back to find Deming’s ideas.

So it seems to me many of the leading agile and lean folks have tracked it back to Deming and then incorporated some Deming’s thinking. Now, the majority of people that are doing agile stuff have no idea that so many of the ideas track back to Deming so well. But I think that agile stuff is largely very consistent with Deming.

And it’s even largely very consistent with Deming when the words don’t match up correctly. So, one of the agile tenets is people over process. That’s not at all what Deming would say. But, in my opinion (from when I read a bunch of the agile stuff and was trying to figure out how to fit things together), what they really said was that the work that people are doing should not be prescribed from on high by processes that prohibit them from doing the work effectively.

In the software development world, they were used to processes being driven by heavy handed business ideas that don’t fit very well with how software development should be done. So that they see the word ‘process’ as tied to heavily prescriptive ideas from people that don’t understand software development imposing process on software development.

Read the full interview with more on how the Deming management system fits with other management strategies.

Related: Software Process and Measurement Podcast With John HunterFuture Directions for Agile Software Development (2008)Assigning Story Points to Bug FixesDeming and Software Development

This entry was posted in Management and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

2 Responses to Agile Software Development and Deming

  1. Paul Ellarby says:

    I totally agreed with you. But according to me this technique is little difficult because one technique that we used for other company cannot be used for your company. Every time we need a different approach to work fast.

  2. Vindil Renado says:

    This is a great post. It helped me understand more about Agile. Keep posting!

Comments are closed.