Lean Software Development

The art of writing software is often cocooned in an overarching processes that sound like Agile and Lean. Those processes describe the delivery flow, the ability to go from requirements to working software and all of the SDLC steps in between. However, with the advent of LLMs now auto generating code, we have a maintenance issue wherein the knowledge of that code, the true usage of it and the optional semantic sugar sprinkled in becomes difficult to identify as time goes on. This gets greatly accelerated when the experience of the developer is simply not there. We always knew about Technical Debt, but are we prepared for the exponential rise in it as we embrace AI? Lean advocates for waste reduction, for a focus on standards, simplicity and the concept of value being added. This is a practice that software engineers simply have not been exposed to both in terms of how we write our code and how we protect our code equally.