Well, Downtime is mainly something that describes the 8 wastes of product development, consisting of Defects, Over-production, Waiting, Non-Utilized, Transportation, Inventory, Motion and Excess Processing. These wastes lead to longer development cycle, affecting the quality of products, arising scope creep risk and increasing project risk.
Here we discuss these wastes and facts like why they happen and how an effective app development process avoids it. Using agile squad development process you can eliminate Downtime.
1. Defects:
Defects are products issues or mistakes producing incorrect or unexpected output while being harmful to project velocity as they take extra time, resources and money to fix. Such issues crop up owing to poor understanding of user stories, failing to fulfill acceptance criteria, poor processes, team misalignment and lack of engineering or technical capabilities.
Ultimately defects usually happen with product development and no team can ever assure that they won’t happen. However you can reduce risk and correct defects quickly so they don’t affect time or budget.
How Process Helps Avoid This
Agile squad methodology offers bug reduction. There are code reviews by developers that improve the quality of the code and zero upon better ways to do things. This way the quality of the end product can be enhanced. Meanwhile, testing begins during development and this result in fewer defects when items are pushed to QA.
2. Overproduction
It is when you produce more than is required to attain the desired outcome or produce before the need arises. In mobile app development, this is seen as extra features or functionalities. The main reasons behind it are inefficient planning processes or inability to prioritize effectively.
How Process Helps Avoid This
You can give a try to rolling-wave planning to eliminate overproduction. It comprises of delaying product decision until you are in the right position to make them. This way you won’t end up building unnecessary features or functionalities. At the same time, rolling-wave planning enables teams to prioritize items in the product backlog as the product decision that is being made is based on the knowledge available to them as the product evolves.
3. Waiting
It’s when any factor causes delays in development and/or delivery, like waiting for information or tasks to be completed, delays from external parties, incorrect capacity planning or resource gaps internally.
How Process Helps Avoid Them
With the help of a squad-based agile approach it’s easy to reduce delays in development. Knowledge can be transferred easily by small- co-located teams and then you can plan together and in relation to resource capacity. It’s advised to avoid issues that occur from relying on third parties/outsourcing. Apart from that, sprints enable team to break up development cycles to integrate efforts and reduce dependencies.
4. Non-Utilized Talent
This is mainly prevailing in the waterfall approach; however agile teams are also guilty of it. This kind of waste takes place when project teams do not succeed in taking advantage of the wide-ranging talents, skills, ideas and capabilities of their team members.
How Process Helps Avoid This
This waste can be avoided using agile principles however in order to fully capitalize on internal employee creativity a process needed to be created that encourages it. Here each member of the project team should be viewed as a creative contributor instead of someone who only completes assigned tasks. Squad-based approach works great in eliminating this waste.
Squad-model offered by us comprises of unique idealization sessions bringing together the insights of the entire squad – product owners, developers, QA, designers, etc, thus informing the direction and possibilities of the product. Sprint planning, delivery and demons is done by all squad members enabling the users to utilize the knowledge and perspectives of each person for the project.
5. Transportation
Here the transportation signifies to hand-offs and the corresponding deficiency while transferring the knowledge. This kind of waste if described as relearning where one member of the team hands off code/tasks/ etc. to another team member who is then required to re-learn what is already known to the first team member.
How Process Helps Avoid This
Here the nature of squads makes certain that every project team member shares knowledge, understanding every the whole of project. This way knowledge deficiencies lessens from one member to the next, reduces knowledge silos while allowing the team to retain knowledge for product maintenance or future phases.
6. Inventory
This waste is referred to unusable work that’s partially completed or completed ineffectively as per project parameters. This influences project velocity, resulting in budget inflation. Waiting, incomplete story information/misunderstanding of the story, dependencies between stories and improper prioritization leads to this.
How Process Helps Avoid This
With all team members being a part in sprint planning, the squad model encourages knowledge transfer with each member well understanding the purpose and functionality of the story. Here the development offers predictable velocity minimizes inventory and mitigates budgetary risk.
7. Motion
Motion means decentralization of teams. Advances in communication tools introduced remote and decentralized teams yet waste is produced when your team is required to initiate communication to solve various issues.
How Process Helps Avoid This
Significant feature of agile squad model, co-location helps in streamlining development time so that issues can be instantly discussed and knowledge is transferred easily which means easy access to solutions.
8. Excess Processing
Similar to overproduction, excess processing happens when effort/time/resources are the reason behind producing something that doesn’t add value like unnecessary bells and wishes. This is said to be gold plating.
How Process Helps Avoid This
Team alignment is the major attribute of squad—based development approach with every member of the squad being aligned towards a common goal having great understanding of acceptance criteria. Here the criteria is for the viable product is the goal and is well-understood by the whole squad. This way the team avoids processing what doesn’t add to the value.
Agile development approach is aimed at eliminating waste in product development. For this you need to create a process accounting for waste risk and is designed to mitigate. Hence using the right process you can avoid Downtime, attaining predictable project velocity.
