Lean Thinking Applied to System Architecting

Software intensive systems are an increasing part of new products, which make the business impact significant. This is especially true for the automotive industry where a very large part of new innovations are realized through the use of software. The architecture of the software intensive system will enable value creation when working properly or, in the worst case, prevent value creation. Lean thinking is about focusing on the increase of customer value and on the people who add value. This thesis investigates how system architecting is performed in industry and how it can be improved by the use of Lean thinking. The architecting process does not create immediate value to the end customer, but rather create the architecture on which value in terms of product features and functionality can be developed. A Lean tool used to improve the value creation within a process is Value Stream Mapping (VSM). We present a method based on VSM which is adapted to enable analysis of the architecting process in order to identify improvements. A study of architecting at two companies shows what effect differences such as a strong line organization or a strong project organization has on the architecting process. It also shows what consequence technical choices and business strategy have on the architecting process. In order to improve the understanding of how architecting is performed a study including architects at six different internationally well-known companies have been interviewed. The study presents the practices that are found most successful. The context of the different companies as well as the architecting practices are compared and analyzed. The early design decisions made when developing software-intensive systems are crucial to the outcome of development projects. In order to improve the decision making process a method was developed based on Real Options. The method improves the customer focus of critical design decision by taking the value of flexibility into account. This thesis provides a toolbox of knowledge on how Lean thinking can be applied to system architecting and also presents how architecting is performed in industry today