Software Development and Wasted Motion

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, August 25, 2009 @ 3:15 am

All the good stories in agile software development start "three manufacturing efficiency experts walk into a bar..." But seriously, I think it's clear that software development has a greater affinity to manufacturing than to construction. So, its good to see the Lean and manufacturing folks get a little blog buzz over at AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com with Jack Milunky's post The 7 Software Development Wastes - Lean series Part 5 - Motion:

Waste #5 in manufacturing is defined as Motion. And motion can be compared to "task switching" in Software Development - as defined by the thought leaders applying Lean thinking to software development.

[...]

I have found in many organizations, especially software companies where there is a real casual atmosphere, it's easy to always interrupt developers. Interruptions are prevalent with requests. All this interruption only serves to add to the Motion bucket of waste. This is where the importance of a Product Owner, ScrumMaster and Backlog come in. These roles and any artifact are there to buffer the development teams from the noise and chaos outside of the current sprint activities.

Sometimes being able to reference another discipline, like manufacturing, lends credibility to discussions with a stakeholder. More often than not, many consider themselves to be an expert on software development but wouldn't dream of challenging an expert on manufacturing.

Related Services: Agile Development, Custom Software Development

Topics: agile, Lean, Manufacturing, Software, Software Development Best Practices, Task Switching

Comments (1)

Software Development

Comments: 1 so far

As I have applied the “seven deadly wastes” to the software development lifecycle, I associated motion with “project state movement”. We used a traditional waterfall method, so there was lots of motion.

For example, passing a project from one developer to another is motion. Passing the project from dev to test is motion. The more times these NVA “motion” activities happen, the more waste occurs.

Just another perspective.
Marcus

P.S. My favorite waste was “Over production”, which I felt mapped very closely to YAGNI.

Comment by Marcus Blankenship, Tuesday, August 25, 2009 @ 10:03 pm

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