Add a new sub-section to your existing paper: 1000 words.

Document the top 7-10 areas of waste you

identify in your organizations software delivery process. Target which of the seven wastes align to your
selected areas and how the waste impacts delivery.

I currently work as a System Functional Analyst in an Information Technology company. The company
has recently implemented the Agile Scrum and Kanban process to move from traditional waterfall
software development process to Agile Scrum methodology. However, having worked in the software
industry for more than 7 years in different methodologies and in the newly implemented Agile process
in my current work place, I have witnessed a lot of wastes which should be avoided in Lean process. I
would categorize the wastes in seven categories as following:

1. Partially work done: This is one of the most prevalent wastes I have seen in the software industry next
to Defects. Most of the work that the developers do in the current software setting are not accounted
for unless the workplace uses a code check in feature or tool. Big IT companies such as Google,
Microsoft and other top players in the IT industry have a robust checking mechanism and protocol to
make sure that the code which is migrated to the production is always checked in, integrated, tested
and deployed. The check in repository maintain the date, time, developer, changes to the code and
other details and have a very strong security assigned for limited access to full time developers. Because
this code is very sensitive to the company and shouldnt be leaked outside.
However, having worked with client projects I recall that most of the clients unfortunately do not have
any such mechanism in place and totally dependent on the developers working with the client. Most of
the code which are there in production have no security protocol for access and can be easily changed
by the business users or any other user who has access to the development environment.

In addition to the above, partially work done is a waste of the time, efforts and resources. The reason is
if the work done by the particular employee is not completed, then the work if handed off to other
developer will result in equal development time to understand the code and development which was
done for the project. For example, consider the scenario of an Oracle End system upgrade in the current
workplace. The project kicked off in January 2017, and after 2 months of Proof of Concept work got
terminated in March 2017, because the higher management decided to pursue other projects which
were of higher priority. The amount of work that was involved all was incomplete and of no use for any
future upgrade, because the same amount of work has to be done again if the project is picked up again
in the future. I consider the partially work done to be the most wasteful of all the seven wastes in
Software industry, because it involves rework and almost all the six wastes in itself.

2. The second most prevalent waste that I have seen in my experience is Defects as I pointed out earlier.
The Defects mainly arise because the developer when developing the code may not be well versed with
all the requirements or various scenarios under which the code has to be tested. Usually what happens
is when the requirements gathering phase is completed, then the development and testing team starts
working parallelly on the code and the test cases. While the development works on the code, the testing
team prepares the Design under test environment in which they prepare the testing inputs to the design
code and get the outputs to be tested from the code. This typical waterfall process of design and testing
works fine in a long term project in which change requests are frequent and involve new
developments or enhancements. However, its not good when the development projects have a tight
budget or timeline for the release, since each defect incrementally increases the cost. In that case, its
best to have the development team and testing team work with each other like following pair
programming or test driven development methodologies.
In test driven development, the development team starts to work on the development after the testing
team is ready with all the test cases for testing the code. In this case, the developers can take into
account all the scenarios which they missed while requirements gathering or during initial design of the
code. In pair programming methodology, the developer can work along with a tester on the code. In this
case, the test cases and the code can be developed at the same time.

The other predominant waste which I have encountered in the software industry working in different
projects are the delays. The delays can be caused by various reasons such as the resources with the
required skillsets are not available in the project. Therefore =, it takes time to recruit the members with
the required skillsets which in turn causes delay depending on the availability of the resources. Many
times I have seen that the review or approval process for the documentation sign off or artifacts sign off
causes a long delay in the successful completion of one phase and onset of the next phase. Sometimes,
the change approval board code freezes the environment because of the upgrade of the legacy systems.
Because of this reason, the development team cannot deploy any new enhancement or promote any
new code to the production system. As long as the code freeze setting in the production environment
will be there, any further new project is inadvertently delayed. A lot of times, delays are caused when
the key members working on the project leave or are serve the notice period before leaving the project.
This behavior kind of stalls the project continuity because the attention of the project diverts to getting
the work which was completed by the key member rather than concentrating on the new development.
Then the project team has to focus on getting a new member on board the project and then train the
new resource via the knowledge transition trainings.

These are few wastes which I have witnessed while working in the software industry for a past few
years.

Thanks,
Prashant