Lean Development: A Tool for Knowledge Management in Software Development Process

Introduction

Evolution of personal computers meant that computer systems are no more used by the programmer only but users from other domains could also benefit from the computing capabilities. As a result, the evolution of high-level languages emerged, and software systems were designed to support users in government, business and other day-to-day tasks. The enhanced dependence on computing systems made the underlying software development quite complex. Since there was no standardized software development methodology in place, so the success of the project was mostly dependent on the skills and experiences of software projects and managers. As a result there were many software project failures and need was felt to define a standardized software process model. Software process is a set of activities required to realize a software product. The most basic definition of software process is presented by Humphrey (1989). He states “software process as a set of tools, methods, and practices used to produce a software product.” While looking closely at software process the underlying activities could be classified into core and supporting activities. Core activities are mandatory activities without which software artifacts could not be finished whereas supporting activities improve the quality of the end product. A list of core and supporting software process activities is shown in Table 1.

With the passage of time, many software process models emerged (see Table 2). Waterfall/linear sequential model is the oldest software process model which advocates for carrying out all software development activities in sequence (cf. Royce, 1970; Pressman, 1996). Later different other models emerged to improve the weaknesses of this model. Among them prototyping (cf. Bischofberger & Pomberger, 1992), spiral (cf. Boehm, 1988), incremental model (cf. Larman & Basili, 2003), V model (cf. Pressman, 1996), Rapid application development (cf. McConnell, 1995), and object-oriented paradigm (cf. Booch, et al., 2007).