Lean architecture

Just before the summer holiday started I went to a NLJUG university session by Xebia. The evening was about their concept of "lean architecture". Lean architecture means applying lean principles like "eliminate waste" to the architecting process. And there is quite some waste to eliminate at most companies :)

After presenting their principles (http://www.slideshare.net/xebia/lean-architecture-university-session-for-nljug-at-xebia-on-july-8th-2010 ) we quickly got to work on a case study. And maybe this was the most instructive part for me. Getting a fuzzy assignment, too little time and a bunch of people. "Go and do it." As an outsider I would say that there were way too much degrees of freedom in the workshop (I counted 8). While you were working on 1 or 2, you would be interrupted about one of the others. Never mind, my take away point is to keep this in mind when I set my students to work.

At the questions at the end they put on their "process" slide. I felt a bit uneasy with it. Agile was al about keeping things simple. But now the scrum process was extended with a productbacklog kanban and an architecture kanban and relationships between the three. Oh well, when you need to choose between changing people or processes, maybe changing processes is easier?