The 7 Software Development Wastes - Lean series Part 6 - Delays

Introduction

Interestingly, this weeks blog covers the 6th waste - Delays - as identified in Lean. How appropriate after the long delay since my last blog post on Task Switching. Herein lies an example of what Delays in software development can cause.  Delays introduce discontinuity and trigger additional wastes already covered like Relearning. It's important in any process, including software, to have continuity. This reduces cycle time and minimizes other wastes like Relearning, Task Switching etc.

The rest of this series can be found here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

Focus on the end-to-end process, not individuals

It's important to identify Delays early on and try to rectify them as soon as possible in order to maximize team productivity. It's interesting... I have been reading many interesting threads on the Agile forums lately about measuring developer productivity, team productivity etc. Managers/executives have us focus our efforts and attention on individuals instead of looking at the end-to-end process to find the real issues that address productivity and enhance team effectiveness.

There's two camps - Tracking Stories or Tracking Stories and Tasks

I have been debating with Ron Jefferies on the XP User Group about whether or not it's useful to do task breakdown and track tasks on a burndown. This friendly debate demonstrates that people work differently under the Agile methodology. Differing perspectives and experiences are worth investigating. Hopefully my comments here reflect Ron's and the XP users' opinions accurately. A lot of what they say makes sense but it seems like each approach has merit.

Camp 1 - Scrum camp

Most teams practicing Scrum track sprints at the Task level but also use Stories and Story Points for planning. Stories are estimated Story Points. During Sprint planning, based on previous velocity (calculated from the number of story points that get completed in a given sprint), Stories are selected up to the maximum capacity of the team. Stories are then broken down into Tasks (in the second half of the planning meeting), Tasks are estimated in hours and tracked on the burndown. Each day a brand new estimate is provided for each of the tasks (mostly just the ones in progress). Hopefully the hours go down and your burndown burns down.

Camp 2 - XP camp