Software Development Waste
These findings may not generalize, but the taxonomy is still a valuable checklist for any team that's trying to figure out how to be more efficient.
| Waste | Description | Observed Causes |
|---|---|---|
| Building the wrong feature or product | The cost of building a feature or product that does not address user or business needs. | User desiderata (not doing user research, validation, or testing; ignoring user feedback; working on low user value features) |
| Mismanaging the backlog | The cost of duplicating work, expediting lower value user features, or delaying necessary bug fixes. | Backlog inversion |
| Rework | The cost of altering delivered work that should have been done correctly but was not. | Technical debt |
| Unnecessarily complex solutions | The cost of creating a more complicated solution than necessary, a missed opportunity to simplify features, user interface, or code. | Unnecessary feature complexity from the user’s perspective |
| Extraneous cognitive load | The costs of unneeded expenditure of mental energy. | Suffering from technical debt |
| Psychological distress | The costs of burdening the team with unhelpful stress. | Low team morale |
| Waiting/multitasking | The cost of idle time, often hidden by multi-tasking. | Slow tests or unreliable tests |
| Knowledge loss | The cost of re-acquiring information that the team once knew. | Team churn |
| Ineffective communication | The cost of incomplete, incorrect, misleading, inefficient, or absent communication. | The team size is too large |