Agile software development changed the way the software development is perceived today. The journey continues now in the new era where the software business meets software practice in a novel way. We are proud to present you the International Conference on Lean Enterprise Software and Systems (LESS).
The journey starts from Helsinki, Finland in October 2010. LESS is organized in collaboration with the Lean Software and Systems Consortium (LeanSSC).
LESS is a new conference in the field of software engineering and software business. It appreciates the cross-disciplinary nature of our field and therefore joins three strong communities together to form a platform for innovative ideas and future developments. We foster the interaction by joining agile software development experts with the well developed lean product development community coupled with innovative ideas nurtured by the beyond budgeting school of thought. All these communities are supported by well-defined educational tracks to involve the university lecturers deeply in the network where future software engineering and business managers are educated.
We welcome you to be part of this exciting and growing community of impacting the future of software business and practice!
The LESS 2010 will have three key tracks - Scaling up agile software to the lean organization, Lean product development and innovation, and Beyond Budgeting. You are invited to submit the papers addressing contemporary issues emerging in the specific or intersection of the proposed areas. Both, papers reporting completed research results and industrial experiences are welcome. Invited are original submissions on the topics including, but not limited to:
. Lean software development . Lean practices for software . Lean values in software . Case studies of scaling from agile software to lean organization . Large scale agile software transformations . The Toyota approach to software development and design . Beyond budgeting studies . Lean software startups . Enterprise software agility . Lean education . Kanban studies, cases in software and systems development . Agile software enterprise . Enterprise level transformation
We call for contributions in the form of research papers, experience reports, panels, lightning talks, PhD-symposium contributions, workshops, tutorials, posters and activities. All paper submissions will be subject to a double-blind review process. Accepted full papers and short papers will be included in the conference proceedings published by Springer as a volume in Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP) series.
All submission details can be found in the conference website http://www.less2010.org.
Program Chairs:
Organizing Chairs:
Lean Product Development and Innovation track chairs:
Scaling agile towards lean track chairs:
Beyond Budgeting track chairs:
Lean product development and innovation
Lean and Innovation have both been touted as transformational strategies that are essential to long term survival of organizations. Lean Product Development brings the two constructs together to gain competitive advantage. The traditional academic and practitioner literature still remains partitioned into the two streams of lean transformation and innovation. The classical lean transformation ideas stem from three books: Machine that Changed the World, Lean Thinking, and Lean Enterprise Value. This has evolved from being product/customer focused to being truly multi-stakeholder, and enterprise value centric. This evolution provides an opportunity to understand and critically assess the coupling between lean enterprise thinking and innovation. The four factors that Van de Ven identified in 1986 as being key to successful innovation, namely, the human problem of managing attention, the process problem of managing good ideas into good currency, the structural problem of managing part-whole relationships, and the strategic problem of institutional leadership, remain relevant today. In this track, we will focus on the application of lean enterprise ideas and principles to the innovation process. The areas covered will include idea generation, new product/service development, sustainment, and retirement.
Scaling agile to lean
Many software teams adopt agile without any significant challenges or problems presenting themselves. However, scaling agile to large development groups, and even further beyond the team to the organizational level pose very significant difficulties. It is difficult to know how to tackle large development groups, to enable agility at the portfolio level, to enable large scale distributed software development, or to make software development an efficient part of the larger Product and System Development process? In this track we aim to document some of these key challenges and consequences as well as present studies and findings from industry and academia on how to tackle these key challenges.
Beyond Budgeting
Beyond Budgeting is a “grass-root” movement of companies that are leaving traditional management practices, including budgeting, for more flexible and dynamic management processes built on a positive view on people. The Lean & Agile principles have much in common with Beyond Budgeting. Lean & Agile challenge traditional beliefs about how best to run business support projects, while Beyond Budgeting challenges traditional thinking about how to best run organisations. Both arrive at very similar conclusions. Complex knowledge organizations operating in uncertain and dynamic environments need agile and flexible processes, supporting fast and value driven decisions. The Beyond Budgeting movement believes that organizations only will realize the full potential from Lean & Agile when this becomes the way we run our business and organization, and not just in our projects.