DOWNTIME is an acronym that is used to describe the 8 wastes of product development:
Defects
Overproduction
Waiting
Non-utilized talent
Transportation
Inventory
Motion
Excess Processing
These wastes result in longer development cycles, affect the quality of products, can lead to scope creep, and increase project risk.
This post will dive into the wastes that occur during mobile app development, why they happen, and how an effective development process is the key to avoiding them. Since we use an agile squad development process, we will speak to how this approach specifically helps eliminate DOWNTIME.
1. Defects
Defects are product issues or mistakes that produce incorrect or unexpected output. They are harmful to project velocity because they take extra time, resources, and money to fix. They arise from poor understanding of user stories, failing to fulfill acceptance criteria, poor processes, team misalignment, and lack of engineering or technical capabilities.
Defects are a reality of product development; teams can never guarantee that they won’t happen, but there are ways to reduce risk and correct defects quickly so they don’t significantly impact time or budget.
How Process Helps Avoid This
Bug reduction is inherently built-in to the agile squad methodology. Code reviews are done by developers, with the purpose of improving the quality of the code and identifying better ways to do things, ultimately enhancing the quality of the end product. Testing begins during development, meaning fewer defects when items are pushed to QA.
2. Overproduction
Overproduction is when you produce more than is necessary to achieve the desired outcome, or produce before there is a need. In app development, this typically manifests as extra features or functionalities. Overproduction is usually the result of inefficient planning processes or inability to prioritize effectively.
How Process Helps Avoid This
Using rolling-wave planning is one of best practices for eliminating overproduction. It involves delaying product decisions until you are in the best position to make them; consequently, you don’t build features or functionalities that are unnecessary. Ultimately, rolling wave planning allows flexibility, reduces risk, increases efficiency, and ultimately results in better quality products.
Additionally, rolling-wave planning allows teams to more effectively prioritize items in the product backlog, since they are making product decisions based on the knowledge available to them as the product evolves. When you use rolling wave planning, plan until you have visibility, implement, and then re-plan.
3. Waiting
Waiting includes any factor that causes delays in mobile app development and/or delivery. This could be waiting for information or tasks to be completed, delays from external parties, inaccurate capacity planning, or resource gaps internally.
How Process Helps Avoid This
Implementing a squad-based agile approach is instrumental for reducing delays in development. Small, co-located teams are able to easily transfer knowledge, plan together and in relation to resource capacity, and avoid issues that arise from relying on third parties/outsourcing. Furthermore, sprints allow teams to break up development cycles to integrate efforts and reduce dependencies. Easy knowledge transfer, co-location, team alignment, and autonomy allow us to deliver better products more quickly with predictable velocity and lower risk.
4. Non-Utilized Talent
This waste is particularly prevalent in the waterfall approach, but even agile teams are guilty of it. It occurs when project teams fail to take advantage of the wide range of talents, skills, ideas, and capabilities of their team members.
How Process Helps Avoid This
Agile principles in general are designed to help avoid this waste, but fully capitalizing on internal employee creativity requires creating a process that encourages it. To do this, each member of the project team has to be viewed as a creative contributor, rather than someone who only completes assigned tasks. We’ve found that the squad-based approach works to eliminate this waste.
