--- title: "Generating Internal vs. commercial value" url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/generating-internal-vs-commercial-value.md" canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/generating-internal-vs-commercial-value.html" published: "2009-09-10T20:15:14+00:00" updated: "2009-09-13T22:09:03.057000+00:00" tags: ["Lean", "Ri"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "On Alistair Cockburn's internal versus commercial value in lean development, and why refactoring, faster builds and teaching people have internal value." usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Generating Internal vs. commercial value [Alistair writes](http://alistair.cockburn.us/Internal+versus+commercial+value) about something which I've only thought about in small glimpses, moving on to my daily business:  One of the basic ideas behind lean development is that you narrow the amount of process that is done at the company to only those things that add value. Continually trying to remove "waste" from your process is a key learning. The big question is "What is value". If your manager is big into "lean" they can say "Don't work on refactoring - it doesn't add any value to the customer" "Don't work on making the build faster - there is no customer value in that" but we all know there certainly is. It's internal value - that makes sure things are kept at the highest quality. In "Lean Software Development" the toyota way is introduced. What I've gleaned from it, among other things, is that you "remove waste - but keep the things you cannot do without" It is those things that make "internal value": - a constantly trimmed and refactored build process - constant refactoring of code base - code churning for readability - teaching people - coaching about problems - having fun at work There is indeed internal value in these things, but as alistair says = there is the danger of saying that anything brings internal value.  For an agile team - it is those things "you can't do without" that you take from more specific techniques like TDD, XP, Continues automation etc... ## Read next - [The three stages of learning team leadership](https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-three-stages-of-learning-team-leadership.html): How Shu-Ha-Ri applies to learning team leadership and TDD: start with practices, then learn the principles, and earn the values over time. - [Immediate and delayed satisfaction in software development](https://www.5whys.com/articles/immediate-and-delayed-satisfaction-in-software-development.html): Why software teams should not accept slow builds and manual work, and how leads who can't stand delayed satisfaction push for automation and fast releases. - [Leadership and the mature team](https://www.5whys.com/articles/leadership-and-the-mature-team.html): Mike Burrows responds to the three maturity stages, arguing self-organization goes beyond self-management and mature teams still need leadership. --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/