Although software productivity measurement and improvement have been studied extensively, there has been little research about enabling software development teams to self-report waste to guide productivity improvements. This study aims to develop and implement a concept to enable software development teams to identify and quantify wasteful activities and assess if the amount of reported waste is usable as a proxy for productivity improvement. We created an empirical categorization of waste in software development and developed a self-reporting survey. To validate the survey, developers from a large company located in Switzerland performed waste self-reporting for three weeks. Though, we found little evidence that the software delivery performance of a team correlates with the amount of self-reported waste, the participants valued the self-reporting survey because it helped them recall and identify the encountered waste.
Piet Heinkade 179
Amsterdam 1019 HC
Netherlands
Software development
Productivity
Efficiency
Waste
Lean
Case Study