Be Agile: Eliminate Waste

  Agile   ProjectsAtWork  

Being agile requires eliminating waste to realize efficiency, productivity and quality gains. That means removing everything that does not deliver value to the customer, including all forms of project debt. Here are six practices that will help you and your team maintain this essential agile principle.

Project debt describes a broad range of compromises that teams make to ship a product sooner. Examples include defect backlogs that carry over from release to release; performing manual testing instead of pursuing automation; automation that is in place but is broken; having hard-coded strings (especially if globalization is required); code duplication and code complexity; faulty builds; an out-of-date version of a compiler; and incomplete cross-functional criteria (for example, accessibility, security, performance, scalability, and so on not being at the required levels). These are but a few examples — there are many more. If not remedied, these shortcuts can hinder the long-term viability of any product, and the costs to remove the debt will likely increase the longer it is delayed.

Project debt needs to be paid back quickly to minimize project costs and maximize the viability of the product. The concept of debt intolerance should drive home the point that teams need to avoid debt to begin with and also recognize areas in which they have debt and remove it as part of …

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