Waste Snakes, Investment Ladders

Wayne is a software developer, ScrumMaster and Agile Coach.

  Agile   Scrum   ProjectsAtWork  

Just as agile teams strive to continuously improve, they should also continuously seek opportunities to reduce wasteful activities. A good start is creating visual representations of a team’s total wasted time over the course of several sprints as well as its time invested in improvements.

For the past year I have had an obsession with waste. Fortunately this is not as unhealthy as it sounds. My obsession relates to identifying where my teams are wasteful and how we can continuously reduce the waste we identify. The end goal is to help the team become more productive by allowing them to focus on productive activities like completing user stories.

So what exactly is waste? One definition describes waste as: An act or instance of using or expending something carelessly, extravagantly, or to no purpose — “it’s a waste of time”

In the team context, my definition of waste is a little different. Here, waste is all the things that the team has to do that are not user stories. Customers have not asked for these things to happen but we have to spend time on them anyway.

However, most wasteful activities do have to happen or no sane team would spend time doing them at all. For example, my definition of waste would label release activities as waste. How are we to get the functionality described in stories into production if we don’t fill out …

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