Lean and Agile - Heads and tails of the winning coin?

These last few months helped me in thinking about complementary ways for improvement in my job.

Of course, I still strongly feel the system advocated by XP is a worthwhile objective for most software teams, but it may not cover alone all the aspects of what makes a brilliant software organisation. Very smart minds, from spheres outside of the Agile community, have also thought about how to drastically reduce the many inefficiencies that we all witness in software organisations. I try not to forget that the key to continous improvement first lies in our continous open-mindedness!

For example, I don't know much about Lean yet, but the little I heard and read lately about it has convinced me to explore it further.

Let's try to define it in one short sentence (sorry for Lean purists!) : the Lean approach is fully directed toward tracking and eliminating the deep causes of the inefficiencies in a given process. First developped by Toyota decades ago in the car industry, it has since brought substantial improvements in many other fields, and now begins to spread in the software world (agile or not).

This makes me believe that the combination with XP could be awesome : genuine XP teams are constantly ready (and willing) to revise and adapt the day-to-day process to the changing reality, and Lean brings the objective tools for analysing processes and measuring the performance... isn't there a match there?

Well, let's stop this post here ; I obviously need to learn more about it before continuing on the subject. Mary Poppendieck and her husband Tom, have wrote many wonderful articles on the implementation of Lean in software, as well as several books. I wonder if this is enough to get a full picture, comprising the roots of the Lean philosophy... let's see and discover!