Mary Poppendieck wrote:Lean applied to manufacturing changed the way material flows through plants - starting in the early 80's in western countries. It was called "Just-in-Time" then, and came to be called Lean in the early 90's, largely because of the book "The Machine that Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production".
Yes. I think "Just-in-time" is very important factor for Agile to be successful, it is applicable to Software Development as well, just accomplish howmuchever work to be done and don't think of future (I might be wrong for Product based companies) but atleast, for non-product based software companies or non-IT enabler companies, gone are the days where huge no. of hours are spent on Design alone (Waterfall style).
The place where I work follows "Just-in-time" for software development. We use Agile+Waterfall approach, when I say Agile, it is basically customized Scrum to fit in enterprise. Every Release would have multiple iterations and each iteration again follows Waterfall approach like
"Requirement gathering + Feature allocation + Design Slam + Development +
Testing + Rollout" and it is incremental until the complete requirement is accomplished and might take multiple iterations.
SCJP 1.5, SCEA, ICED (287,484,486)