PhD thesis Nauman bin Ali Supervisors: Prof. Claes Wohlin Dr. Kai Petersen Opponent: Letizia Jaccheri

1. Operationalization of Lean thinking
through Value Stream Mapping with
Simulation and FLOW
Nauman bin Ali
Supervisors: Prof. Claes Wohlin
Dr. Kai Petersen
Opponent: Letizia Jaccheri
letiziajaccheri.org

2. Content
• Introduction & Background
• Summary of Thesis
• Critical discussion of the issues in the Thesis
• Conclusion

3. Software Development
Resources Activities Products
• Hardware
• Software
• Documentation
• Planning
• Analysis
• Design
• Construction
• Testing
• Training
• Implementation
• Follow-up
• Enhancements
• etc...
equipment
How to improve?

4. • Attempt to organize the software life cycle by defining
– activities involved in software production
– order of activities and their relationships
• Goals of a software process
– standardization, predictability, productivity, high product quality,
– ability to plan time and budget requirements
Software process model

5. • “determine the order of stages involved in software
development and evolution, and to establish the transition
criteria for progressing from one stage to the next.
• These include completion criteria for the current stage plus
choice criteria and entrance criteria for the next stage. Thus a
process model addresses the following software project
questions:
• What shall we do next?
• How long shall we continue to do it?”
Process model goals (B. Boehm 1988)

6. • Software process
enactment – software
development
environments (to
automate the activities)
• Software process
simulation (to predict
and decide)
Software process simulation

7. SOME AGILE METHODS
- Agile software process model [Ayoama, 1998]
- Adaptive Software Development [Highsmith, 2000]
- Crystal Family of Methodologies [Cockburn, 2000]
- Dynamic Systems Development Method [Stapleton, 1997]
- Extreme Programming [Beck, 1999]
- Feature-Driven Development [Palmer & Felsing, 2002]
- Lean software development [Poppendieck x 2, 2003]
- Scrum [Schwaber, 1995; 2002]
- Mobile-D™ [Abrahamsson et al., 2004]]
- Agile Modeling [Ambler, 2002]
- Internet-Speed Development [Cusumano & Yoffie, 1999; Baskerville
et al., 2001; Truex et al., 1999]
- Pragmatic Programming [Hunt & Thomas, 2000]

8. Lean
• Lean – manufacturing developed by Toyota between
1950’s & 80’s
• Developed by – Taiichi Ohno @ Toyota
• Lean - reason for Toyota’s consistent success in a
stagnant industry
• Initial Agile enthusiasts were inspired by lean
manufacturing.

9. 7 Principles of Lean Development
1. Eliminate Waste
2. Amplify Learning
3. Decide as late as possible
4. Deliver as fast as possible
5. Empower the team
6. Build integrity in
7. See the whole

10. 22 Tools of Lean (Mapping to Principles)
• #1 Eliminating Waste
1. Seeing Waste
2. Value Stream Mapping
#2 Amplify Learning
3. Feedback
4. Iterations
5. Synchronizations
6. Set Based Development
#3 Decide as late as possible
7. Options Thinking
8. The last responsible moment
9. Making decisions
#4 Deliver as fast as possible
10. Pull Systems
11. Queuing Theory
12. Cost of delay

11. 22 Tools of Lean (Mapping to Principles)
• #5 Empower the team
13. Self-determination
14. Motivation
15. Leadership
16. Expertise
#6 Build Integrity In
17. Perceived Integrity
18. Conceptual Integrity
19. Refactoring
20. Testing
#7 See the Whole
21. Measurements
22. Contracts

12. #1. Eliminate Waste
1. Learn to see Waste
2. Value Stream Mapping
“Can you please do an hour’s worth job in a day!“
- Taiichi Ohno (Non-value activities adds up to the cost)
Lean focuses on eliminating waste by focusing on flow of value from request to delivery
Muda Muri and Mura

13. Wastes in IT World
• Unnecessary features
• Gold plating
• Delays
• Hand-offs
• After the fact QC
• Interim work artifacts
• Meetings
• Complexity
• Inefficiency
• Constant re-prioritization
of active work
• Interruptions, start-stop
work
• Handoffs
• Discarded / lost
knowledge
• Miscommunications
• Useless Information
• Wrong tools
• Excess Troubleshooting
for problems solved in the
past
• Obsolete policies and
standards
#1. Eliminate Waste – 1. Learn to see Waste

14. Value Stream Mapping
• Used to understand visualize current system, future
system and eliminate waste
#1. Eliminate Waste – 2. Value Stream Mapping
Modeling language

15. Value Stream Mapping
• Don’t find faults / improvements in current VSM
• You haven’t yet mapped where you want to go
• The next step after current value stream map is to ask
“How do we want our VSM to be after 3 years in the
future?”
• Then you can draw the VSM of the future state
Current
State
Future
State
Unclear Territory
Adopted from Mike Rother/Improvement Kata
#1. Eliminate Waste – 2. Value Stream Mapping

16. Research framework
• Experiment
• Literature review
• Case study
– Students
– Professionals
• Action Research
WorldScience
1564, Pisa, Italia

17. Content
• Introduction & Background
• Summary of Thesis
• Critical discussion of the issues in the Thesis
• Conclusion

18. Concepts - Title
• operationalization
– of
• lean thinking
– through
• value stream mapping (VSM)
– with
• Simulation (SPSM)
– and
• FLOW

19. Systematic Literature Review (Ch.2)
• Nauman bin Ali, Kai Petersen and Claes Wohlin, ‘A
Systematic Literature Review on the Industrial Use of
Software Process Simulation’, Journal of Systems and
Software, Volume 97, November 2014, Pages 6585,
ISSN 01641212.
• Important points
– Existing reviews
– Review Q: what evidence has been reported that the
simulation models achieve their purposes in real-world
settings?
– 87 primary studies
– No reported cases of the transfer of technology; not
inexpensive; no evidence to substantiate the claimed benefit
of SPSM

20. Case study with students (Ch. 3)
• Nauman bin Ali, Michael Unterkalmsteiner, ‘Use and
evaluation of simulation for software process education:
a case study’, In Proceedings of the European
Conference on Software Engineering Education
(ECSEE), Seeon, Germany, 2014. <Won best paper
award>
• Important points
– SPS game
– Assessing software development process understanding (RQ1)
– Impact of SPS on students’ understanding of software
development processes (RQ2)

21. Literature Review and Action Research
(Ch. 4)
• Aggregating software process simulation guidelines
• Important points
– Understand SPSM studies
– Six steps process
– System dynamics based simulation model to be tested at the
companies

22. Research Process – Two Industrial case
studies (ch. 5)
• Simulation assisted value stream mapping for software
product development: an investigation of two industrial
cases
• Important points
– Two products at Ericsson AB Sweden
– 10 workshops
– Simulation for discussion not prediction

23. Research Process – Industrial case study
(Ch. 6)
• FLOW-assisted value stream mapping in a large scale
software product development
• Important points
– Combine VSM with FLOW notation
– Ericsson AB Sweden

24. Meta-Literature Review (Ch. 7)
Identifying and evaluating strategies for study selection in
systematic literature studies

25. Publications International conferences:
1. Nauman bin Ali, Michael Unterkalmsteiner, ‘Use and evaluation of simulation
for software process education: a case study’, In Proceedings of the European
Conference on Software Engineering Education (ECSEE), Seeon, Germany,
2014. <Won best paper award>
2. Nauman bin Ali and Kai Petersen. ‘Evaluating strategies for study selection in
systematic literature studies’. In Proceedings of the International Symposium
on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), Turin, Italy,
2014. <Won best shortpaper award>
3. Nauman Bin Ali, Kai Petersen, Mika Mäntylä, “Testing highly complex system of
systems: an industrial case study.” Proceedings of the ACMIEEE international
symposium on Empirical software engineering and measurement ESEM 2012:
211220
4. Nauman bin Ali, Kai Petersen, “A consolidated process for software process
simulation: State of the Art and Industry Experience”, 38th IEEE EUROMICRO
Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA),
2012: 327336 for the best paper award and invited to submit an extension to
an ISI journal
5. Kai Petersen, Nauman Bin Ali, “Identifying Strategies for Study Selection in
Systematic Reviews and Maps”. International Symposium on Empirical
Software Engineering and Measurement ESEM 2011: 351354

26. Journals:
1. Henry Edison, Nauman bin Ali, Richard Torkar,
"Towards innovation measurement in the software
industry", Journal of Systems and Software, Volume 86,
Issue 5, May 2013, Pages 13901407, ISSN 01641212
2. Nauman bin Ali, Kai Petersen and Claes Wohlin, ‘A
Systematic Literature Review on the Industrial Use of
Software Process Simulation’, Journal of Systems and
Software, Volume 97, November 2014, Pages 6585,
ISSN 01641212.

27. Workshops and Theses
• Kai Petersen and Nauman bin Ali. ‘Operationalizing the
requirements selection process with study selection
procedures from systematic literature reviews’, submitted
to the 6th Workshop on Requirements Prioritization and
Communication, REFSQ, Essen Germany, 2015
• Nauman bin Ali, Henry Edison, ``Towards innovation
measurement in the software industry'', Master Thesis in
Software Engineering, Thesis no: MSE2010: 11, May
2010
• Nauman bin Ali, ``Towards guidelines for conducting
software process simulation in industry", Licentiate thesis
in Software Engineering, Blekinge Institute of
Technology, ISBN: 9789172952577,2013

28. Contributions
• Contribution-1: Recognizes the central role of VSM in
operationalization of Lean in the SE context and improves the
existing guidelines for conducting VSM.
• Contribution-2: Determined the usefulness of SPSM to support VSM
in artifact flow analysis and when reasoning about changing the
process.
• Contribution-3: Determined the utility of FLOW to support VSM to
capture, analyze and improve information flows in software
development.
• Contribution-4: Determined the usefulness of SPSM in applied
settings.
• Contribution-5: Consolidated guidelines to apply SPSM in industry.
• Contribution-6: Improvement in the guidelines for conducting
systematic literature studies by providing means to systematically
perform and document study selection related decisions.

29. Content
• Introduction & Background
• Summary of Thesis
• Critical discussion of the issues in the Thesis
• Conclusion

30. Some pointers before we get critical
• Candidate’s topic is clearly well chosen, and bears
interest far beyond the immediate settings
• Candidate has defended his principal arguments in
respected scientific forums world-wide
• The publication record is outstanding
• Candidate has engaged in a truly industrial and
education research base
• All of these facilitates the critical discussion…

31. Rationale for personal interest
• The topic clearly bears significant theoretical and
pragmatic relevance.
• How did you decide to research the interconnection of
LEAN, VSM, Simulation, and FLOW? What does come
first and last?

32. MOTIVATING THE RESEARCH ANGLE
• You raise the role of VSM as a key role in LEAN
• Could you elaborate, based on your empirical findings
how projects in the studied company have concretely
suffered from NOT having a proper LEAN VSM in place?
• And what about SPM and SPMS?

33. Publications
• You have published extensively in several different
conferences. This is a great demonstration of your
academic performance skills and dedication.
• Could you elaborate on the relation
– between the chapters (2 – 7) and the publications?
– Between the publications? Literature Reviews (SPSM) – Case
Studies (LEAN VSM)
• Which of the conference publications do you believe
have potential to be published in any of the fine software
engineering journals?
• Are you planning to do this?

34. WHAT IS YOUR MAIN RESEARCH
QUESTION?
• your work: How to operationalize LEAN Thinking in the
software engineering context?
– How to improve artifact flow analysis?
– How to improve information flow analysis?
• Can you reflect about this RQ and the RQs which have
guided the LRs?

35. Principal Concept Definitions are
ambiguous
• Please explain us how you would define the main
concepts that are often used in the Thesis
– LEAN
– VSM
– SPSM
– FLOW
– Literature review
– Case Study
• Which is the most important concept that people in this
room should remember after today? Why?

36. Agile method selection not clear
• You have chosen Lean
as the agile method
representative
• Why?
• Can you better explain
your choice?
• Did you get feedback
from the company
about this choice?

37. Issues Regarding
the Research Approach
– How were the company entities recruited?
– What were the means you used to gain access to practitioners
and students?

38. Theoretical Impact
• In your view, what do you
think are your primary
contributions to theory
development?
• What is the theory that your
work contributes to?
– If Lean and/or SPM, what
is the theory that they rely
on?

39. Final question: the future
• Based on your research with company and students
– what will happen to
• LEAN
• VSM
• SIMULATION
• Literature reviews and empirical software engineering
– In the future?

40. Contributions
• Contribution-1: Recognizes the central role of VSM in
operationalization of Lean in the SE context and improves the
existing guidelines for conducting VSM.
• Contribution-2: Determined the usefulness of SPSM to support VSM
in artifact flow analysis and when reasoning about changing the
process.
• Contribution-3: Determined the utility of FLOW to support VSM to
capture, analyze and improve information flows in software
development.
• Contribution-4: Determined the usefulness of SPSM in applied
settings (discussion not prediction?)
• Contribution-5: Consolidated guidelines to apply SPSM in industry.
• Contribution-6: Improvement in the guidelines for conducting
systematic literature studies by providing means to systematically
perform and document study selection related decisions.

41. Content
• Introduction & Background
• Summary of Thesis
• Critical discussion of the issues in the Thesis
• Conclusion