For software development, overproduction relates to developing much more features than what customers really need or developing features that customers are not likely to need in near future. When you decompose the story into tasks in your sprint planning meeting, try to spend good amount of time and involve all the team members. This will help you to come up with “all” the required tasks to complete the story. If you do not do this, you will have insufficient list of tasks but in reality you have to perform “all” tasks to complete a story.

Ajitesh was responsible for enabling enterprise-wide adoption of leading-edge technologies and related practices, including, implementation of relevant tools and frameworks. He also spearheaded the DevOps, Big Data and Analytics practice at Evoke. Time is a critical resource, there is always a cost of delay. When it comes back for fixing, it becomes an additional cost, with almost no additional value to the customer.

Defects must be caught as early as possible and must not be passed to downstream processes. Every defect passed to the customer creates a poor experience for the customer. One thing to note here is how eliminating waste cannot be done in a silo, it requires a deeper understanding of what is valuable for your customer. Any activity that absorbs resources but does not add any value, as perceived by the customer, is waste. Taiichi Ohno, father of the TPS, called it a management system for “the absolute elimination of waste” .

Here are the seven most common areas you’ll find waste in your software development life cycle and how you can solve them with a DevOps approach. Even if you have the perfect development process and have delivered a high-quality feature, you spent resources developing something no one will use. Suppose you are in a leadership role – Agile Coach, Scrum Master, or Manager. In that case, you can work with your team and organization to educate them and help people identify and visualize those wastes. This will result in a list of ideas and suggestions for continuous improvement that is highly relevant to them, increasing the chances of implementing those improvements, and minimizing potential resistance.

What is Waste?

These seven principles continue to be widely accepted today. The key concept here being value – by eliminating waste, one keeps only that which creates value. Today I’d like to start a brand new series, the focus of which is the elimination of waste from our software development efforts. Waste elimination can be traced all the way back to the the mid-1900’s, the birth of lean manufacturing, and the Toyota Production System . This can be a huge waste in software development, this is represented by development work done but has not been released.

This motivates them and also gives a sense of ownership, which, thus increases productivity.Lean offers too much flexibility. One of the most common wastes of the current software development methodology, including Agile, is setting up development and test environments. Each time a new software developer joins the team, IT staff is found to be spending a considerable amount of time setting up and configuring Dev/QA environments. Additionally, if there is any change in the configuration of existing applications, developers/IT staff gets involved in reconfiguring the environments.

There are a lot of features in software that are not being used and/or valued by the customers. This means that, no matter how good those features are, they constitute waste. Following a minimum viable product model in software development helps to eliminate this waste. When talking about test environments, these are dedicated test servers and any changes to application configuration requires the dedicated test server’s configurations to be changed relatively.

When teams working from different locations if the information is not properly handed over, then this will lead to wait time. So make sure there is proper handover and obtain confirmation from the other side of the team. Also make sure to execute the tasks at one location as much as possible this will reduce the hand off time to the possible extent. So whatever feature or functionality or process step that neither adds any value nor being used, then it will be considered to be a waste and should be eliminated from the system/product/process. Let’s take a look at Lean in action and how real companies have benefited from Lean startup thinking and Lean software development.

A lot of people would argue that if their team stopped doing their daily stand-ups then things will start to go wrong in a couple of days. The flip-side could be a monthly status meeting, does anything crucial come out of the meeting, could half the participants stop going to the meeting? Try and look for processes/procedures in your daily/weekly/monthly work and have a hard look and see if any can be missed.

Any feature or low-value features that are added for/by the customer but not asked for/don’t contribute to the revenue increase is a waste of effort. While it may not technically cost much to store stagnant software “inventory,” it’s still unfinished work the organization paid for but is not seeing returns on. And the more partially completed work tickets that start piling up, the greater your potential Insider Jokes Only Programmers Will Get Programing jokes, Programmer jokes, Computer humor cost when you try to address them later. Think of anything almost done – in software development that might be code in a local branch and not integrated into the central repository. Similar to requirements that are thoroughly detailed and completed in advance but are not implemented. Align and improve processes continuously in pursuit of perfection with software development from DevOps.

Waste #5: Delays

By the time a third project is added, nearly half of his or her time is lost to context switching. We shall see the meaning of each of the 7 wastes of software development, reasons behind, and possible strategies to eliminate with respect to the “Agile Software Development”. Generally, you will get into these wastes during your sprint planning or during your sprint execution. Net Solutions is a strategic design & build consultancy that unites creative design thinking with agile software development under one expert roof. Founded in 2000, we create award-winning transformative digital products & platforms for startups and enterprises worldwide. In manufacturing and the Toyota Production System, the underlying principles are known as the Toyta Way.

The principles of Lean work well in both manufacturing and service industries, and the ideas on eliminating waste are important to keep in mind when developing software. It may require pushing back against management in order to implement Lean processes, but that’s a battle worthy of participation. Try to evaluate the technical complexity of the story based on the functionality.

Great article Deepti, a checklist for us and lots we can get better at. I think extra processing is also all the extra steps/work that come from not using best tools. ​​There are many techniques available to validate your product idea and. The key is not just to gather user feedback but also to welcome new changes.

If your team has time to produce new features the customer doesn’t need, they have time to work on identifying and preventing defects. While this work may not be as fun for a developer, it’s a better use of time. What is a Cellular Network You can never truly be “defect-free” in product development cycles. There is no “end state” of your software; it’s constantly evolving to respond to technology innovations, changing threat landscapes and more.

How do The 7 Wastes of Lean affect Software Development?

Over a period of time, “Eliminate Waste” has become the fundamental concept of Lean which had been used in manufacturing industry. Every time a person switches between tasks a significant switching time is incurred to gather the thoughts and re-orient to the new task. In their book ‘Peopleware’,Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister describe flow as a highly productive state of concentration.

• Real-world examples include financial services, retail, and the automotive industry.
• It is a fact of life that nothing is ever perfect, it is not meant to be a doom and gloom view of things, to get to zero waste would be impossible.
• Fundamental to Lean Software Development is the pursuit of minimizing waste.
• Waste is any activity that does not increase the value of the product or service.

Say, for instance, you are serving ice cream to your customers and you put a cherry on top of your ice cream but your customers do not really want to pay extra for the cherry, then it is adding no value to your customer. In this example, the activity of adding cherries to the ice cream is a waste, as the customer really does not want to pay for the extra cherry. Now in reality you may be someone who would love the cherry on your ice cream, so this example may not work for you. In Lean manufacturer, the seven original wastes consist of transportation, inventory, motion, waiting, overproduction, over-processing, and defects.

So the tasks that are not identified in your sprint planning may lead to additional effort which is not planned so it may finally push your story to “incomplete” state. Lean software development methodology focuses on delivering value quickly and efficiently. However, for Lean to be effective, you need the right people with enough of the right skills to minimize waste. Where there exist IT skill gaps, a major issue for US businesses today, this can be a roadblock to Lean development. In Lean, the learning process is supported by short iteration cycles to continually supply feedback about customer needs, problems, and potential solutions. For example, Lean embraces the concept of testing small experiments such as changing the colour of a design element or adding a different image.

However, if the customer has a requirement that all web services must respond in 15ms or less then the further optimizations are of value. Every business has processes, but are there processes that yield no tangible benefit to the software being released? These could be forms that need to be filled or sign-offs from particular people in the organization.

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Always try to do “Value Stream Mapping” and see what is the value add time and what is non-value add time. This will give you an idea of what is your current process efficiency. Based on the current state of value stream map and by applying lean practices you can improve the cycle time and thereby reduce the delays. Also automate the test cases wherever possible so that it will reduce considerable amount of time when you have to run them recursively. Make sure you have all the required skillset assigned to your project. If you start a sprint without having the required team members with proper skill set it will lead to delays.

Delays that prevent work are obvious sources of waste, but also remember that a delay could be a pause in between handoffs. Interruptions could be due to many reasons such as lack of complete information on the task, hardware Installing Python Modules Python 3 10 7 documentation related dependencies etc. Make sure the tasks are detailed enough in the sprint planning meeting and identify any external dependencies upfront and raise them as impediments and let the scrum master work on them.