3 Waste Generators: Debugging, Design, and Wrong Features

A Guide to Minimizing Waste through Strategic Debugging, Agile Design, and User-Centric Features.

Prompted and edited by the author.

When we talk about software development, it often becomes difficult to know what needs to be improved to be more effective. Managers often have to deal with data and realities that are hard to reconcile with partial information, and decisions are frequently made that seem good but turn out to be ineffective. That is why, in our seek for waste reduction, we will focus on the ability to deliver more value with less effort, or to achieve more with less.

If we delve into typical methods for waste reduction, we often enter the territory of retrospectives that try to look back at what has been done and reflect on how to improve. Well, not only retrospective, there is also the land of the managers trying to improve the whole software development process. Sometimes it seems that bugs take up a lot of time, and we need to improve how we address them. Other times, it might appear that we need to improve how we define things before starting to have fewer issues and do better. And so on. But, without doubt, we believe that there are actions to be taken here and there to improve the process.