Unfortunately, no researcher has been investigating this issue in the scholarly community at the time of writing; hence, there is an instructive lack of studies with respect to this point. To solve this issue and to provide some basis for our review, we decided to review some approaches and techniques used by various movie directors with respect to management practices.

Akira Kurosawa, a famous Japanese director, shared his vision and thoughts about filmmaking in his autobiography (Kurosawa, 1983). In this book, he is portrayed as actively involved and directly participating in every single aspect of the movie production (including writing the scripts, developing the design, preparing the actors, placing shots and editing; Stiglegger, 2001). This, it can be argued, is what gave Kurosawa's movies the feeling that the director was in command over every aspect of the production process (Richie and Mellen, 1998) as well as what determined part of their success. This capacity, we note, is also important in software engineering, where having a leader, who is highly experienced in every aspect of the project development, is an important condition for the successful implementation of the project itself (Alefari et al., 2017).

However, Kurosawa was not solely responsible for the writing of his movies. He was actively collaborating with other screenwriters. Each of them worked on the same script, often at the same time, adding text and suggestions and often different points of view. At a later stage, Kurosawa reviewed the scripts produced and picked what he thought was the best, among those that were submitted to him. This rather authoritative way of selecting and organizing contents helped Kurosawa streamlining potential disagreement among different scriptwriters. We note that this approach is often replicated in the software development industry. For example, the process of architectural design is in many ways analogous to that of screenwriting. In such a process, each qualified team member does provide his or her own version of the project structure, but then the project leader intervenes and ultimately chooses which one he would like to pursue.

However, it is worth also noting that despite this rather authoritative approach to production during his career, Kurosawa preferred working with the same group of creative technicians, crew members and actors, popularly known as the “Kurosawa-gumi” or Kurosawa's group. The intimate relations between professional team members usually contributes to increase the project's quality. It can surely be argued that Kurosawa-gumi ensured the success of Kurosawas'movies (Nogami, 2006). Again, the same results (project's improvements)—we notice—are often achieved by following this practice in software engineering. Well-established and long-term collaborative partnership between and within software engineering teams do provide higher work efficiency during the project development and contribute to maximize outcomes as well as results (Whitehead, 2007).

Another very famous director—Steven Spielberg—who is also a fan of Kurosawa—perhaps inspired by him—developed his own way to organize and supervise the production of a movie (Acuña, 2018). One of the greatest strengths underlying Spielberg's work is arguably the capacity to meticulously plan the pre-production stage of his movies (Gordon, 2007). This involves paying a lot of attention to the movie script as well as to the storyboards and to the mockup, a full-sized structural model of the movie typically used for reviewing format (Awalt, 2014). Such careful planning, it has been argued helped Spielberg sticking to deadlines and production budgets, determining many of his successes (Morris, 2007). On a similar vein, we note that the waterfall approach in software engineering, which typically allows the breakdown of projects into linear sequential phases, each characterized by a specific deliverable that depends on the deliverables of the previous phase and corresponds to a specialization of tasks (Adenowo and Adenowo, 2013), requires a similar approach.

Another decisive component, which arguably contributed to the success of Spielberg's work is his direct involvement in the selection of the professionals used in the movie production (Awalt, 2014). Spielberg is known to give special attention to friendly management and social skills. His priority is to achieve the maximum degree of cooperation possible in any given project in which he is involved. This requires remaining open to suggestions for improvement coming from other team members (Peña-Acuña, 2018). As software development is a deeply collaborative process (Saeki, 1995; O'Neill, 2001), we notice that successful team leaders in software engineering often adopt this type of practice (Whitehead, 2007).

To answer this second sub-question we looked at existing successful implementation of Lean principles in filmmaking.

First, we found that the Lean principle of focusing on people, its motivation and collaboration (Poppendieck and Cusumano, 2012) has been largely adopted by moviemakers. Filmmaking is an quintessentially collaborative practice that relies on different types of talents, skills, and expertise, all working collectively to successfully produce the end product, the movie (Hodge, 2009). Pixar studio recently introduced a policy that allows everyone in the company, irrespective of their position, to express their opinions, provide feedback, and share their ideas with the director. The aim of this policy is to maximize collaborative interactions among team members and boost production and efficiency (Moreira, 2020).

Besides, it is worth noting that the Pixar studio represents a very good illustration of how a company can successfully use lean principles. At various stages of the film production, their workers actively use various lean tools and procedures (such as Kanban and Andon) to minimize waste and avoid production bottlenecks. For example, in his movies Pixar director, Jason Blum, aims at reducing waste by producing small-budget films, which use relatively inexpensive shots and limit the number of locations, dialogues, and speaking roles (Yakimchuk, 2017).

Another important thing to mention in this context is the first Lean filmmaking experiment made by Eddy and Eddy (2020). The goal of this experiment was to apply a number of Lean principles to the movie production process. In his experiment, which involved recording a hackathon, groups of eight-nine people were creating films for 2 days working in abbreviated cycles. Each film cycle was showed to an audience with the purpose of gathering feedback, which informed subsequent changes in the production line. In this way, the need for a script was abolished, as it was considered redundant. The experiment was quite successful and the authors' achievements confirmed the possibilities to tailor and adapt software engineering techniques to different contexts (such as movie production).

To further analyze the potential relevance of software engineering methods, practices, and techniques to filmmaking, we also looked, as mentioned in the introduction, at the Agile approach. Specifically, we analyzed it in terms of movie production. A study by Figueroa (2015) claimed that Agile methodologies can be applied successfully in filmmaking based on similarities between movies and software projects. According to Martell (2015), Scrum methods can be applied to any kind of work and are “perfect systems for adapting to the film industry” Martell (2015).

Another important aspect of our research involved an analysis of the importance of collaborative efforts. Such an analysis was instrumental to answer the third research question characterizing our work.

First, we researched teamwork practices in Stanley Kubrick's work (Perko, 2018). We found out that one the many skills in which Kubrick excelled was communication (Falsetto, 2001). Not only that, but we understood that he was always open to suggestions and ideas from other crew members and that he was also a good listener (Phillips, 2013). It can thus be argued that this peculiar talent and overall attitude also helped him winning over his people hearts and minds.

Our investigation of Kubrick's work revealed that Kubrick, in order to streamline movie production, often used to divide larger tasks into smaller ones. More specifically, we found out that he used to separate crew members in smaller groups and assign them a team leader (Falsetto, 2001). This approach was pursued to determine a fair and efficient division of the tasks among workers (Adam, 2016). Moreover, such an approach to team management was instrumental to introduce another crucial cooperative practice; that of mentorship. Team leaders and even Kubrick himself occasionally assumed the role of mentors to guide, orient, and help young and inexperienced film workers. This was instrumental to provide them with opportunities for learning and developing their respective careers.

However, it is important to note that there wasn't an unlimited degree of freedom for collaborative team members under Kubrick's supervision. Krubrick extensively used the social capital as well as the connections he had accumulated over his career, to persuade people, put under pressure, or even directly control them during the production process of his movies Kubrick (2001).

A number of studies mention leadership as a crucially important factor in collaborative processes (Ferren and Stanton, 2004; Slater, 2005; Ciancarini et al., 2021a,b). For example, Mainemelis and Epitropaki (2014) examined the way in which Francis Ford Coppola organized the production of his masterpiece “The Godfather.” The director in this case used an approach that can be called of extreme leadership, according to which “the leader act as the troublemaker, who induces crises and creates chaos” (Mainemelis and Epitropaki, 2014).

During the shooting of The Godfather, Coppola used to continuously change script as well as the shooting process. Coppola had understood that film creation process is fluid and one must always search for new ideas and opportunities to improve the project. This flexible approach allowed him to better integrate creative contributions from its crew mates.

Now, we know that at the beginning the production of The Godfather wasn't going so well because of these continuous changes. We also know that Coppola was on the verge of getting fired; yet he continued applying his style to the production of his movie, making unusual and risky decisions (such as the decision to cast Brando and Pacino for leading roles). Nevertheless, Coppola efforts were crowned with success, and the movie has given him international acclaim.

As the reader may recall the significance of the third research question lied in the identification of movie practices that are potentially applicable to software development. At the time of writing we can not say whether the techniques we discussed above can necessarily be beneficial in the software industry. This is because the current available scientific literature did not investigate this specific question.

However, our analysis was significant because we discovered that software development and filmmaking share a common nature; that of both being highly collaborative and creative social practices (Mitchell et al., 2003). Collaboration in software engineering and filmmaking is certainly complex and happening at many different levels, as we have seen above. For example, project members in both the IT and Cinema Industries typically deal with how the work is separated, how the results are gathered and combined, how the resources are allocated, or how the communication is organized. This requires a significant amount of coordination, cooperation and organization; however, it seems that the combination of these factors (and possibly of more, involving of course also a good degree of creativity) is a recipe for high work performance and success. On these grounds, we can probably suggest that, at least, some filmmaking practices and techniques could be successfully adopted in software development.

Our review of the literature allowed us to identify relevant information about the adaptation of software development techniques in the movie industry: Our literature review, in particular, established that:

We nevertheless also found that software development techniques or approaches can also be used in filmmaking. In particular, we found:

In addition, in the context of filmmaking practices we also found: