Copyright © 2018 Mr. Udit Kumar Nath et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. International Journal of Engineering & Technology, 7 (2.33) (2018) 432-437 International Journal of Engineering & Technology Website: www.sciencepubco.com/index.php/IJET Research paper Issues of lean-agile software development environment Udit Kumar Nath 1 *, Satyasundara Mahapatra 2 , Prasant Kumar Pattnaik 1 , Alok Kumar Jagadev 1 1 School of Computer Engineering, KIIT Deemed to be University, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India 2 Department of Computer Science & Engineering, PSIT, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India *Corresponding author E-mail: uditnath@yahoo.com Abstract The popular waterfall model is widely accepted approach for project management paradigm; however lean based agile model is the re- cent revolution to reduce work in progress items and makes transformation to better process by identifying and eliminating non-value- add activities and increase productivity with quality of deliverables. This paper includes the issues that involved in lean- agile process. Keywords: Agile Methodologies; Kanban; Scrum, Lean; Value Stream Mapping (VSM); Waterfall Model. 1. Introduction In today’s world, customer wants to work in an environment where they drive more control of the product development. They want to adopt a culture of introducing frequent changes and seek quick solution, which enables them to visualize and decide sched- ule to make product live. In other language, customer wants an incremental product enhancement despite of current volatility and uncertainty prevailing in market. Due to this, customer would like to accustom itself with new trends rather than stick itself to old model, where scope, schedule and timelines are fixed during ini- tial phase of development and lots of approval processes are in- volved to move ahead from preceding phases. Currently custom- er’s priority has changed from stringent timeline, scope and budg- et to more interactive and responsive agile model. The advantage of this model is to align development work in line with the chang- ing business needs. This newly invented process came around 2001, where several process methodologists conducted meetings to discuss future trends in software development. They observed that the newly invented process model has a lot of similarity due to which they named this model as agile, means a combination of light and efficiency [2]. This model emphasizes on having more of people interaction, working software and customer collaboration [19], which will help achieve a better quality output. In old days, there was a process [10] model known as Kanban that widely used to achieve effective use of this agile model [16]. Kanban is a mod- el where team’s maximum focus is to eliminate the work-in- progress items by using Kanban board. This model not only min- imizes WIP (Work-in-progress) items and but also increases in- formation flow within project. Generally Kanban board is used for graphical representation of all the activities involved. One of the key concepts behind Kanban model is the entire process flow can be optimized by reducing the work-in-progress items. The other valuable aspect is to reduce the unused items; those can be easily achieved through Kanban process flow. The above model of re- moval of unused (non-value add) items is known as lean. In other way, lean is an agile model, whose objective is to create value and eliminate the waste for customer. Apart from waste elimination, there are certain defined principles of agile processes which wide- ly used are known as agile manifesto. In addition to this, there are some literature reviews already available on challenges due to the adoptability of agile based lean model. The next section, Section 2, provides a quick background on envi- ronment of agile development Section 3 explains the need of agile environment. Section 4 discusses the challenges and limitation of agile model. Section 5 explains the connectivity within agile lean Environment. Section 6 shares a brief literature review of agile process of software development. This is followed by Section 7 that represents the conclusion of the study. 2. Agile software environment Agile is a software development environment [13] where devel- opment happened continuous and progressively. The primary fo- cus areas of this model are team collaboration and respond to fre- quent customer change. In other way, it is known as an alternative approach to document driven, heavy weight process model. Apart from this there are certain values [11] and principles which always need to be prioritized are known as agile manifesto. Following are the core values of agile: • It requires individual contribution and interaction rather than following strict process and tools to complete the pro- ject. • It focuses more on workable software rather than following tedious document. • It involves more on customer collaboration rather than con- tract negotiation. • This model always ready to respond the frequent change re- quest by customer rather than following stringent project plan. Apart from the above principles & values, there are many agile related development methods, which are widely used in software development methods [22]. Those are DSDM (Dynamic System Development Methods), XP (Extreme programming), Crystal Clear, FDD (Feature driven development) and Scrum. Out of all these methods, Scrum is widely used [17]. Initially it was only used for software development [18] process model, but latter it formally accepted as it works well for any complex and innovative scope of work. Like waterfall model, scrum is also divided in to logical modules which known as sprint. Sprint is usually 2 to 4