waste

Close those bugs

Do you have bugs that have been open for a long time and that are low priority? Cancel them.

Jira Metrics 2.12

I’ve released JiraMetrics 2.12, with a number of bug fixes, and a new chart that I’ll describe below.

Prioritization

There two different times that we need to prioritize work and we should be using completely different approaches to that prioritization, for each stage.

The metrics covered in our Flow Metrics Basics class show how to measure different aspects of flow, but those metrics don’t in themselves, show how to improve the flow. We’ll look at one way to improve now.

Continuous improvement

Back in the days when faxing between companies was a popular thing, I recall a client that had a workflow like this:

Fax arrives and is printed by the fax machine
Paper is picked up by a person and carried to the scanner where is it digitized.
Paper is immediately shredded because there was confidential information on it.

Fractional people

I worked with two teams that shared a database specialist, for a fairly proprietary system. Because she was on two teams, they had her attend all meetings for both teams. Two standups, two planning meetings, two retrospectives. She ended up doing crazy amounts of overtime because she couldn’t get her regular work done during the day. Her days were filled with meetings, and it was only after everyone else left that she got anything done.

Technical debt and productivity

Technical debt is made up of all those things in our system (architecture, code, documentation, etc) that are working but are of sufficiently poor quality that they cause us to move slower when implementing new functionality. Perhaps we need to do additional testing before we can add something new or we need to refactor the code to make it cleaner or more extensible. Perhaps it’s just hard to read or understand and therefore difficult to know how to add the new functionality.

Improving meetings

When we look for opportunities for improvement, at some point every team will bring up meetings as being an ongoing problem for them. When we dig into what the actual problems are, we find they always fall into one of three categories:

Per-story estimates

Per-story estimates were an interesting experiment that failed and it’s time to move on. Today, we have better ways so it’s time to stop putting individual estimates on stories. This is equally true for Scrum and Kanban teams.

Technical Debt

The term “technical debt” is widely used in the industry even if there isn’t a clear definition of it and almost nobody uses the term in the way Ward Cunningham meant when he first coined it. It’s most commonly used to describe things in our environment, usually but not always code, that slow us down. These are things that are working - not bugs - but that are implemented in a poor way that makes them more difficult to understand or modify.

The cost of interruptions and how to reduce it

Interruptions can be a significant source of waste. By their nature, interruptions cause a context switch as we lose track of what we had been working on to focus on the interruption. There is a significant cost to that context switch as it takes time and effort away from the task at hand. There is also a real impact on quality as mistakes are far more likely to happen when we’re distracted.