When an organization takes on an agile mindset, enterprise architecture doesn't go away, but the role of enterprise architects changes. Enterprise Architects no longer make choices, but help others make the right choice and then radiate that information. Enterprise Architects still need to form a vision, but then need to build bridges between teams to build communities of learning. These will allow teams to explore new approaches and learn from each other, with Enterprise Architects as partners in that growth.

An inception is an activity done at the start of a project to gather together the people involved and set a common direction and working style for the on-going work. The lean inception is a focused form of inception, which can be done in a single week. During this time we understand the key features and customers for the product, and build a canvas to formulate the characteristics of a Minimum Viable Product.

I'm thinking of using agile software development - but should I use Lean software development instead?

Canary release is a technique to reduce the risk of introducing a new software version in production by slowly rolling out the change to a small subset of users before rolling it out to the entire infrastructure and making it available to everybody.

As regular readers of my work may know, I'm very suspicious of using metaphors of other professions to reason about software development. In particular, I believe the engineering metaphor has done our profession damage - in that it has encouraged the notion of separating design from construction.

As I was hanging around our London office, this issue came up in the context of Lean Manufacturing, a metaphor that's used quite often in agile circles - particularly by the Poppendiecks. If I don't like metaphoric reasoning from civil engineering, do I like it more from lean manufacturing?

One of the arguments used to support the adoption of lean techniques in software is the success of Toyota. So do Toyota's recent quality failings undermine the case for lean software development?