When Eric Ries wrote The Lean Startup in 2011, the strategy and mindset he proposed influenced various industries, including software development. The center of Eric’s thesis is that we want to ensure that we’re delivering something of quality with as minimal waste as possible. As he puts it in a blog post on linkedin.com (http://mng.bz/xMO8),
“The problem is that quality is really in the eye of the beholder. For a for-profit company, quality is defined by what the customer wants. So if we are misaligned with what the customer wants, then all the extra time we take to polish all the edges and get everything right is actually wasted time because we end up pushing the product away from what the customer wants.”