lean it

Lean Management

Competitive advantage

As a result of much greater demand than supply, the development of enterprise management software benefits from a particular status. There was no pressure for change that would be sufficient to impose a Total Quality culture in this sector, as it had imposed on industrial production for more than 50 years.

Scrum is a concept from Lean industrial environments[1]. However, most of the concepts that have proved their effectiveness in industrial production (notably in the Toyota production system) have not passed or been accepted by the software industry.

And they should have been considered.

Those that software production should adopt, and did not adopt, are too many for these notes, but we leave here some concepts for inspiration.

Gemba or go to the place. The most serious of all quality shortages in traditional software production is the process of error checking. In the production of traditional software, the detection of bugs is done by testers[2] and at the end of development. This grossly violates the third of Edward Deming’s 14 Points for Total Quality Management[3]. It is true that quality control only at the end is better than no quality control[4]. But dependence on inspectors is strongly discouraged. Errors are detected outside the context in which they were produced and, if not in place, it is much more difficult to perceive its cause and act upon it. Work (and equipment) is added to later stages of production when one could have detected the problem as soon as it was introduced into the software. Responsibility is diluted and the culture of quality is not created by anyone who participates in the production of software.

Kaizen or continuous improvement. The fragility of traditional software production, dependent on programmers and their specific skills and even moods, is reflected in the way the software is being built. Traditional software does not come from a production line that is tuned. Each programmer writes a portion of the code, joins it with other programmers, and gives their task complete. Once the software is finished, it is delivered. It does not continue to improve. It will only be improved if a defect is found later. If you meet the minimums (work) there is no effort to make it more efficient, more robust or more suitable for use.

Jidoka or intelligent automation. The production of traditional software is not automated. But at Quidgest, the machine automatically detects possible errors, and human intervention has the power to stop the production process, repair the problem, and find the cause to eliminate the hypothesis of later occurrences. Production is not resumed until this cycle is executed.

Poka-yoke, that is, “error-proofing” or “preventing inadvertent errors”. It is a well-illustrated concept comprised of the shape of a battery, a memory card or a microchip, which prevents these objects from being placed incorrectly.

It should be noted that, like the other dimensions discussed at the Q-Day 2018 conference, Lean IT applies to autonomous and decentralized software production organizations and collaborative team networks. It requires a culture of its own, shared by all who participate in the production of value, which leads back to Gemba.

The contribution of Quidgest

At Quidgest, the software results from an automated production line, Genio. Software production adopts, much more easily, the logic of industry. Pattern identification allows the use of machines in tasks previously only performed by humans. Its reuse creates a critical mass of cases and application contexts that invite continued improvement.

Genio, as an automated industrial production line, has a modeling /design component and a code-building component.

The model is an additional space, which opens up excellent opportunities for the implementation of Total Quality. Based on the concepts Jidoka, Poka-yoke, and Kaizen, Quidgest integrated into Genio innovative ways of guaranteeing the quality not only of the products it manufactures but of the production process.

The previously mentioned Scaled Agile / SAFe[5] is a chain that aggregates Agile and Lean IT and is probably the movement to which we must be more attentive. We join you with the automatic modeling and generation of software and we have the quality environment that exists in Quidgest, which we consider ideal.

But Quidgest is still an exception. We do not know of any other software company, present in the global market (that is, excluding investigations of lower scope at the academic level), in which the model unambiguously defines the entire information system. That is why it is possible to extract any information system (especially the most complex ERP) from an industrialized process.

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[1] The New New Product Development Game, Hirotaka Takeuchi e Ikujiro Nonaka, Harvard Business Review, January 1986
[2] Existe uma dinâmica Associação Portuguesa de Testes de Software https://www.pstqb.pt/. Do mesmo modo, há, nas comunidades meetup, inúmeros grupos focados em testes de software, espalhados por todo o mundo. E muitas ofertas de emprego como Test Engineers, mesmo em empresas consideradas Agile  https://jobs.jobvite.com/farfetch/job/oCSF3fwW

ABOUT

Quidgest is a global technology company headquartered in Lisbon and a pioneer in intelligent software modeling and generation. Through its unique generative AI platform, Genio, develops complex, urgent, and specific systems, ready to evolve continuously, flexible, and scalable for various technologies and platforms. Partners and large organizations such as governments, multinational companies, and global multilateral institutions use Quidgest’s solutions to achieve their digital strategies.

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