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Industrial waste - Process waste   25 Sep 04
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(Source: Phlip posted this to the XP list) "Industrial waste" is when a factory produces something it shouldn’t. Heat, smoke, extra chemicals. This is wasteful because it represents energy and materials that went into the factory, but did not come out as product.

"Process waste" is the behaviors that don’t produce a working product. The biggest waste in the industry today is "programming in the debugger". This is so endemic nobody even calls it waste. Our vendors work very hard to supply us with advanced debuggers, so we can merrily cause problems and then fix them, instead of preventing problems.

Another big waste is delayed integration. Some shops account for how many modules we must write, then specify the modules’ interfaces, and tell each programmer to write a module separate from the others. Then at the end of this cycle the programmers start trying to integrate. They might not even have build scripts to plug the modules together; they might find themselves manually integrating by clicking on the user interface to an IDE.

Delayed integration costs some orders of magnitude more than the cumulative cost of continuous integration does.

Get ahead of these problems. Write tests first, constantly review code, don’t own code, and integrate continuously. Write and maintain build scripts that support all these behaviors seamlessly.

Don’t delay surprises. If "our product has an installer" appears as a motherhood story, integrate the installation system early, and test it every day. Don’t wait for the last iteration.

The ideal is that the last week before a big release should look and feel just like any other.

 

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