Measuring the Flow in Lean Software Development - Software development flow measurement and visualization

Oct 26, 2026

Agile and lean software development prioritize rapid responsiveness to customer needs through continuous, smooth flow. This paper applies cumulative flow diagrams to visualize the flow of lean software development and introduces novel measures linked to the diagrams. The measures aim to increase throughput, reduce lead time, and provide tracking of product development progress. An industrial case study shows practitioners find the measures useful for identifying improvements, including managing complex parallel task work, and the measures become part of ongoing improvement at the company.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages29

Reading Time1 h 13 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Measuring flow and waste in lean development

Related work

Related Work

Bottlenecks and requirements flow continuity

Research method and case study design

Results and evaluation

Practical and research implications

Conclusion

SOFTWARE—PRACTICE AND EXPERIENCE Softw. Pract. Exper. 2009; 00:1–7 Prepared using speauth.cls [Version: 2002/09/23 v2.2] Measuring the Flow in Lean Software Development K. Petersen∗ ,†, C. Wohlin‡ Blekinge Institute of Technology, Box 520, SE-372 25 Ronneby, Sweden SUMMARY Responsiveness to customer needs is an important goal in agile and lean software development. One major aspect is to have a continuous and smooth ﬂow that quickly delivers value to the customer. In this paper we apply cumulative ﬂow diagrams to visualize the ﬂow of lean software development. The main contribution is the deﬁnition of novel measures connected to the diagrams to achieve the following goals: (1) increase throughput and reduce lead-time to achieve high responsiveness to customers’ needs, and (2) to provide a tracking system that shows the progress/status of software product development. An evaluation of the measures in an industrial case study showed that practitioners found them useful and identify improvements based on the measurements, which were in line with lean and agile principles. Furthermore, the practitioners found the measures useful in seeing the progress of development for complex products where many tasks are executed in parallel. The measures are now an integral part of the improvement work at the studied company. key words: Agile Software Development; Lean Software Development; Development Flow; GoalQuestion-Metric 1. Introduction Agile software development aims at being highly focused and responsive to the needs of the customer [1, 2] . To achieve this practices like on-site customer and frequent releases to customers can be found in all agile practices. Agile practices can be further enhanced by adopting practices from lean manufacturing. Lean manufacturing focuses on (1) the removal of waste in the manufacturing process; and (2) analyzing the ﬂow of material through the manufacturing process (cf. [3, 4 , 5]) . Both aid the responsiveness to customer needs that agile ∗ Correspondence to: Kai Petersen, Blekinge Institute of Technology and Ericsson AB, Sweden †E-mail: kai.petersen@bth.se; kai.petersen@ericsson.se ‡E-mail: [claes.wohlin@bth.se](claes.wohlin@bth.se) Received xx August 2009 Copyright 􀀍c 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Revised 2 K. PETERSEN, C. WOHLIN seeks to achieve. Firstly, removing waste (everything that does not contribute to customer value) frees resources that can be focused an value-adding activities. Secondly, analyzing the ﬂow of development aids in evaluating progress and identifying bottlenecks. For the removal of waste and the improvement of the ﬂow it is important to understand the current status in terms of waste and ﬂow, which is supported by visualizing and measuring it. Improving the ﬂow means shorter lead-times and thus timely deliver of value to the customer. In manufacturing cumulative ﬂow diagrams have been proposed to visualize the ﬂow of material through the process [6] . Such a ﬂow diagram shows the cumulative number of material in each phase of the manufacturing process. To the best of our knowledge, only one source has proposed to analyze the ﬂow of software development through ﬂow-diagrams by counting customer-valued functions [7] . However, the usefulness of cumulative ﬂow diagrams has not yet been empirically evaluated. The novel contributions of this paper are: (1) The deﬁnition of measures to assess the ﬂow of lean software development with the goals of increasing throughput and creating the transparency of the current status of product development; (2) The evaluation of the visualization combined with the proposed measures in an industrial context. The case studied was Ericsson AB in Sweden. The units of analysis were nine subsystems developed at the case company. The structure of the case study design was strongly inspired by the guidelines provided in Yin [8] and Runeson and H¨ost [9] . The data collection started recently and therefore cannot be u

FAQs

What problem does the paper address in agile and lean software development?

It targets the need for continuous, smooth flow that delivers customer value quickly. It also focuses on understanding current status regarding waste and flow to support improvement.

How do cumulative flow diagrams and the proposed measures contribute?

The paper uses cumulative flow diagrams to visualize development flow and defines measures connected to these diagrams. These measures support higher throughput, reduced lead time, and transparency of product development progress.

What did the industrial case study show about practitioner usefulness?

Practitioners reported the measures were easy to use and helped guide management decisions, such as prioritizing requirements and assigning people. They also integrated the measures quickly into status meetings and tracking for complex products with parallel tasks.

Oct 26, 2026

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