I think almost everybody experienced cases when things are moving very slowly in IT companies or teams. You have many people, talented engineers, Agile process and development speed is still below expectations. We try to focus on performance and efficiency last 10 years, improving our practices and tools. But we are still there in terms of speed when they are applied to real life cases. How is it possible? In this talk we will review the concept of waste circles and understand what are the main sources of time waste in development process. This concept would help you to check your processess, focus on right things and achieve much better results in your organization or team.

1. Wasteful waste or why
everything is so slow in
development
Mikalai Alimenkou
@xpinjection
http://xpinjection.com

3. Telegram channel
https://t.me/xpinjection_channel

4. Disclaimer
This talk is based on
personal experience

5. What is our performance?

6. Let’s tune our Agile process!

8. No good metrics for performance

9. Customers always want…
New features ASAP!

10. It’s impossible to
understand if
performance
limit is reached

11. Big team is not
always
effective

12. Top performance mode

13. Developers have different focus factor

15. Definitely great source of improvements

16. Waste Circles: another view on waste
Your performance
Technical waste
Team waste
Process waste
Organizational waste

17. Stories about organizational waste
Bad coffee
Global meetings and
corporate discussions
Lunch time
Bureaucracy

18. Typical meeting structure
Get out of work
context
Waiting Useful part
Discussions
and relax
Get into
work
context
15 minutes
30-40 minutes

19. • Planning (4 hours)
• Grooming (2 hours)
• Daily Scrum (20 minutes)
• Retrospective (1 hour)
• Demo and Sprint Review (2 hours)
Waste % = 12.3/80 ~ 15.5%
Process waste

20. Stories about team waste
Communication
CI/CD
Additional roles
Conflicts

21. Stories about technical waste
Technical debt
Code review
Bad tools
Defects

22. Let’s calculate your performance, bro!
Focus factor = 0.7 [ideal] * (1 –
OrgWaste) * (1 – ProcWaste) *
(1 – TeamWaste) * (1 – TechWaste)
For some large teams in ineffective
organizations actual FF ~ 0.1-0.2 for
ALL TEAM MEMBERS

24. Summary
• Focus on waste analysis instead of performance tuning
• Start from waste with maximal impact
• Don’t add waste continuously through your process
• Monitor waste level with right metrics
• Adopt focus factor based capacity planning
• Use product increment as the only performance metric

25. Some books on this topic

26. @xpinjection
http://xpinjection.com
mikalai.alimenkou@xpinjection.com