One Simple Delivery

Let’s say you are working on some project, which has got it’s own process. And you keep wondering how much time is actually getting lost during on it. How efficient it is. How much of the time get wasted on bureaucracy and how much is actually spent on the valuable things.

Ok, what you can do is try to measure things, and that’s how you can do it. Make just one simple change and see how it goes. You can start with a real task, or you can just make it up in a sake of making it. For example if you are working with react you can add one simple component in the code.

So what can be the story of one simple delivery:

Before development:

The task has to be communicated somehow. How long does it take to create a card for it. Do you spend extra time on adding labels to it, marking certain checkboxes, moving it from column to column.

Then it is gets idle there for some time. How long does it take to get it acted upon, how long it waits in a backlog.

Development:

Let’s say developer has taken the card. How long does it takes to understand it. How long does it takes to make all the rituals before writing code: marking card as taken, moving it from column to column, updating repo, creating branch for it. How long does it takes to start the project. How long did it take to actually implement the feature. How long did it take to fix tests and linting errors, adjust project specific code style before pushing, you do that right? And then again all the rituals with the cards.

After development:

The code has been written, pushed what else is missing before it gets accepted? CI, Code review, manual testing. And then finally it reaches the main branch.

So try and measure all these numbers, and see which work is useful and which might be not. May be there is a room for optimization for your team. May be some of the practices are just bothersome.

Lately I see many small companies using the processes of the big ones. And you know, that they are different. Once your company grow, and I hope it is happening, you have to adjust the process to you team size. The process effective for 1 person might be terrible for 10 people, and useless for 100 people, right? But it seem to work the other way around. If you are working with the team of size of 3, and use process for 30 people or even for 10 people, you might be spending a lot of time on bureaucracy.

May be you don’t need several branches, may be you don’t need corporative code style, may be you don’t need code documentation, may be you don’t even need the kanban board, the chat might be enough. It all depends on your particular case.

Choose wisely.