Lean thinking has spread from manufacturing to software development and its impact is significant in a number of respects.

First of all, it has influenced the Agile movement as recognition grew of the overlap between Agile approaches and lean principles, reinforcing Agile and adding to Agile practices a solid foundation. Second, Lean adds new techniques to Agile practices, for example the idea of Kanban and in particular the combination of Kanban Scrum, which is explored in this Master Class. Third, Lean thinking provides a way of analyzing an organization not just from an IT perspective but from the business through to IT activities. Value Stream Analysis allows an organization to understand where it is today, where it wants to be, and provides a means of analyzing how to change and achieve the transformation. Finally, Lean thinking is a language that the business understands, helping bridge the language barrier between the business and its IT people.

Agile software development practices are now in the mainstream of application methodologies and processes. The Agile approach has brought fresh thinking to how we should manage development projects as well as examining the core construction practices. As a result, techniques such as daily stand-up meetings, test driven development, continuous testing, pair programming, Agile estimation and the 'planning game', requirements representation as stories, use of whiteboard with velocity and burn-down charts are becoming common. Agile breaks from the waterfall tradition in being an iterative process, and unlike other iterative techniques, it has multiple layers of iterations with an emphasis on the Sprint-like iteration as the shortest iteration to deliver working code to the client, in a matter of weeks and not months or years.

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