"There are many wastes associated with excess documentation: the squandering of time spent creating and reviewing reports, and the unnecessary work involved in change requests and associated evaluations, priority setting and system changes. But the biggest waste of all is that of building the wrong system if the documentation doesn't correctly and completely capture the user's requirements"
The above truly reflect the current situation of many organizations. In the name of documentation for future reference,most companies indulge in creating volumes and volumes (or rather mega bytes and mega bytes) of documents, which affects the development process. Just because we have an easy to use tool called 'MS Word', should analysts and designers spent too much time in such documentation. Instead I really feel that we should set priorities on what adds value and what does not adds value to the ultimate customer.
Please read through the entire article to understand how some of the goods things followed by the Japanese in manufacturing can be applied to software development.
Some how I had always felt that there is not much difference between manufacturing processes and software development processes. Does this mean we can apply MRP to software development? Why not? I know a way to do it (will publish it at a later point of time)
