Software Development Waste
Summary
Sedano et al (2017) on "Software Development Waste" identified and describe that software projects manifest nine possible types of waste, in terms of loss of productivity and unnecessary friction.
These are my notes on the paper, where I summarize the waste taxonomy according to the paper, and speculate about possible relationships between the wastes and their causes.
Types and causes of waste
- Building the wrong feature or product
- User desiderata (not doing user research, validation, or testing; ignoring user feedback; working on low user value)
- Business desiderata (not involving a business stakeholder; slow stakeholder feedback; unclear product priorities)
- Mismanaging the backlog
- Backlog inversion
- Working on too many features simultaneously
- Duplicated work
- Not enough ready stories
- Imbalance of feature work and bug fixing
- Delaying testing or critical bug fixing
- Capricious thrashing
- Rework
- Technical debt
- Rejected stories (e.g. product manager rejects story implementation)
- No clear definition of done (ambiguous stories; second guessing design mocks)
- Defects (poor testing strategy; no root-cause analysis on bugs)
- Unnecessarily complex solutions
- Unnecessary feature complexity from the user’s perspective
- Unnecessary technical complexity (duplicating code, lack of interaction design reuse, overly complex technical design created up-front)
- Extraneous cognitive load
- Suffering from technical debt
- Complex or large stories
- Inefficient tools and problematic APIs, libraries, and frameworks
- Unnecessary context switching
- Inefficient development flow
- Poorly organized code
- Psychological distress
- Low team morale
- Rush mode
- Interpersonal or team conflict
- Waiting/Multitasking
- Slow tests or unreliable tests
- Unreliable acceptance environment
- Missing information, people, or equipme
Possible Relationships
