Software Development Waste - Todd Sedano, Paul Ralph & Cécile Péraire, ICSE 2017

This resource first appeared in issue #90 on 02 Sep 2021 and has tags Technical Leadership: Software Development, Technical Leadership: Other

Software Development Waste - Greg Wilson, It Will Never Work in Theory Software Development Waste - Todd Sedano, Paul Ralph & Cécile Péraire, ICSE 2017

Wilson briefly summarizes a paper by Sedano, Ralph, and Péraire, who looked at eight software development projects at Pivotal, a software development company, for 2 years and five months, interviewed team members, and analyzed retrospectives. They identified nine broad categories of wasted time and/or effort in the projects:

  • Building the wrong feature or product
  • Mismanaging the backlog
  • Having to re-do work
  • Implementing unnecessarily complex solutions
  • Extraneous cognitive load (from technical debt, large/complex stories, poor tools/code, etc)
  • Psychological stress
  • Waiting
  • Knowledge loss, and
  • Ineffective communication

These will likely sound familiar. Note too that other than cognitive load from technical debt, these are all process issues, not technical ones.

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