Removing Software Development Waste to Improve Productivity

One way to improve productivity is to reduce waste: objects, properties, conditions, activities, or processes that consume resources without benefiting stakeholders. However, reducing waste can be very challenging. People quickly acclimate to wasteful practices and waste is often hidden by bureaucracy, multitasking, poor prioritization, and invisible cognitive processes. To better understand software development waste, we conducted an in-depth study of waste at Pivotal Software, a large American software development organization, known for using and evolving Extreme Programming. This chapter describes the different kinds of waste we discovered and recommends a variety of strategies for waste removal.