Is Lean Agile and Agile Lean?: A Comparison between Two Software Development Paradigms

Lean and agile development are two development paradigms that were proposed to help dealing with highly dynamic markets and the resulting rapid changes in customer needs. As both paradigms address a similar problem, it is interesting to compare them and by that, determine what both paradigms can learn from each other. This chapter compares the paradigms with regard to goals, principles, practices, and processes. The outcome of the comparison is: (1) both paradigms share the same goals; (2) the paradigms define similar principles, with one principle (“see the whole”) being unique to lean; (3) both paradigms have unique as well as shared principles; (4) lean does not define processes, while agile has proposed different ones such eXtreme programming and SCRUM.