I’ve attended a couple of seminars by the authors of Leading Lean Software Development. Mary and Tom Poppendieck did not shy away from the tough questions at the seminars which is a good sign. This book attempts to tackle some of those really tough questions and more and it does a good job at it.

There are many references to real corporations and situations which helps back up the claims the book is making regarding lean software and human behaviour in general. This is always a welcome addition for me because it is sometimes difficult to believe some of the claims because they are rather unintuitive and often against traditional western thinking.

The subtitle of this book is “Results Are Not the Point” which is prime example of going against traditional western thinking. The idea in this case is to focus on improving your software delivery system and stop focusing so much on the products. This will in turn help you produce better software more reliably because you won’t be just burning people out with overtime each time to get results. At least that is my interpretation.

Overall, I did find the book was a bit dry and perhaps a little too detailed at times. There is just so much information in there I suppose it was difficult for the authors to distill their knowledge down. The book is well organized but I think it also requires quite an investment to soak up all the information in there.