Three Pivotal Practices to Eliminate Waste

I received my program for the Better Software Conference & Expo this coming June 9-12 in Las Vegas (alas, I will be unable to attend). The description for the keynote that will be given by Jean Tabaka caught my eye. Jean Tabaka is an Agile Coach from Rally Software Development and the author of Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders).

Her keynote is entitled "Attacking Waste in Software: Three Practices We Must Embrace Now" and the abstract is as follows:

One of the seven principles of Lean Thinking is “eliminate waste.” Eliminating waste means minimizing the cost of the resources we use to deliver software to our stakeholders. Jean Tabaka proposes three pivotal practices that we must embrace to aggressively attack waste in software delivery —- Software as a Service (SaaS), Community, and Fast Feature Throughput:

1. Software as a Service (SaaS) eliminates waste by deploying software-based services without the cost inherent in traditional software delivery—materials, shipping, time delay, and more.


2. Community involves stakeholders working together to create products rather than competing among themselves for limited resources. Community eliminates waste by democratizing software development to obviate the need for multiple systems with the same functionality.


3. Fast Feature Throughput refers to development methods that embrace change and quickly deliver value to customers. It eliminates waste by responding to market pull with short, incremental delivery cycles.

When IT and all software organizations embrace these practices, they will eliminate waste within their organizations, reduce the waste that consumes our entire industry, and ultimately support the broad 21st century global mandate to manage our scarce resources.

I can't help but think how these same "pivotal practices" apply equally well to Agile CM, resulting (presumably?) in Software CM as a Service (SCMaaS), Community, and Rapid Change-Flow (where the latter refers to both quickness and responsiveness of change assessment and approval, as well as to development velocity as the changes flow through codelines and become integrated, built, promoted and released).