Lean Development : Eliminate Waste II

This is going to be another short post. Luckily we only have three points to cover...

The remaining 3 points from my earlier post on the first principle of lean software development are:

• Over Processing
• Over Production
• Defects and Rework

Over processing is doing more work on a product than is required. For software this may mean performance tuning code that isn't performance critical, handling edge cases that can never occur, making code overly flexible. All these kinds of things waste time. Now the tricky part is working out what the "over" part is. Thankfully this issue is addressed in an agile style development system where you get the roughest possible solution out to users and tweak it with their feedback. If the users aren't complaining then you don't need to fix it.

Over production in a production environment, means producing more stock than the consumer will consume or at a rate that leads to a build up of inventory. In a software situation I consider the features to be analogous to the product. If you are producing features that are not needed by the customer then you are over producing. In a software sense this is very similar to the over-processing.

Defects and Rework, in my experience, are where a large chunk of waste in a traditional software development lie. I seem to spend a lot of time fixing bugs. So what do we do about it? Test Driven Design, Continuous Integration and "Stop the Line" are some of the tools advocated by Lean software. I guess I'll have to write about some of them in another post.

As I said this was going to be a short one. I'll move on to the next of the principles tomorrow...