Eliminating waste

Taiichi Ohno identified the most common forms of waste as waiting, overproduction, extra processing, transportation, motion, inventory, and defects. Let's look at how those concepts of waste apply to software and systems development.

Waiting

Waiting is a problem because that means we are not getting something done that the customers want, or it is impacting the productivity of the team. For example, if the team is waiting on requirements, or information necessary to refine the requirements, they can't build the features that the customers want. If they are waiting on items from the Product Backlog to be prioritized, they cannot deliver the features and functionality that the customers value the most.

Items identified within a Product or Sprint Backlog are, by definition, waiting to be worked on. However, as you will see in the next subsection on overproduction, this is not a bad thing as long as they are not the highest priority items. In other...