I'm going to the Lean Summit in Noordwijk tonight, hoping to meet practioners from other disciplines than Software Development. After reading draft's of Lean Software Development me and other people in the Benelux got interested in lean manufacturing and product development (as you could see from the Value Stream Mapping exercise we did at the most recent xp-nl).

One of the interesting things for me, is that eXtreme Programming already pre-eliminates some 'waste' for you, and helps in decreasing batch size (amount of functionality that can be planned and delivered) and increasing quality without adding quality-checking-after-the-fact. I'm curious to see in the future, how we can further improve speed, quality and customer satisfaction by applying lean techniques to our project (ehm, oh yes, that's becoming products now).

Mary Poppendiecks' talk at XP2004 was also quite interesting in that respect - if you want your software project to live a healthy long life, it is probably wise to look at it as product development, and manage it as such.