Software's Seven Deadly Wastes - Jez Halford

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PyCon UK Conference Software Development Optimisation Teamwork Organisation Efficiency Development

Write up of Jez Halford’s talk about software’s seven deadly wastes from PyconUK 2017.

Good talk about on applying the principles originating from the Japanese manufacturing industry in the middle of the 20th century to software development.

Key Points:

  • Try to keep the effort to get from idea to production as straightforward and automated as possible
  • Work on as few things at a time as possible.
  • Avoid interruptions like irregular meetings and pointless things like hot-desking, they waste time.
  • Take ownership of your work and if information is missing go find it, talk to people and move work along.
  • Solve the problems you have not the imaginary ones you think you may have in the future.
  • Don’t write features you don’t need or that aren’t specifically wanted. Measure usage and remove what doesn’t get used to reduce maintenance effort.
  • Bugs in production waste a lot of time. Use automated testing, continuous integration and dev/prod parity to catch these bugs as soon as possible and reduce the effort wasted on them.

Jez Halford - Software’s Seven Deadly Wastes @ PyconUK 2017