Waste in Software Development

“A developer sits at his desk for 8 hours writing code, don’t tell me he wasted his time!”

Unfortunately I'm going to tell you that he probably did – or at least some of it! If you can't tell me what he actually delivered over the past sprint then some of your development team's precious time will be have been wasted! And worse... it will be because you told them to waste it!

Let me explain... You're very good at planning your sprint, but do you follow-up at the end of the sprint and measure what was delivered. If you do, how much of it was in the original plan compared to the reactive work you told him to do? How much of it contributes to the “Big Picture” or “RoadMap”?

We've all read the blogs that say, only allocate 60% of time to project work, allocate time for technical debt etc etc, but do you measure what ACTUALLY happened. Can you track back over the last few months and show much effort has been spent on TD, or on bugs, or where it really matters ON THE ROADMAP?

It's funny, but if you don't measure actual output, it is so easy to allow a 'just this once' or 'but this is an important customer' to distract you from the plan. Just by measuring, people seem to develop a backbone, and say no to these interruptions, putting them on the backlog where they belong!