I've been re-reading some of the manufacturing and DevOps books that I've collected over the years. In these texts, there are a number of concepts that stand out, but one that resonates with me is the concept of waste. There's actually a good article on LinkedIn about waste that's worth reading as well. While it's easy to start spinning in circles and thinking everything is waste around you, step back and keep some perspective that some waste is inevitable because the world is messy. Don't get too caught up in waste, but try to reduce waste where you can.

One of the areas that I think contains a lot of waste in software development is the effort to build features that won't be used. Like many of you, I have been asked for no shortage of changes to software in the past. Often those changes require both application and database changes, usually to support a new way of conducting business. 

The interesting thing to me is that often I'll work my through a queue and get changes completed, a percentage of which rarely, or even never, get used. What seemed like a good idea when it was requested, specified, and scheduled may not be a good idea weeks or months later.

In other cases the latest request is labeled as important and needing to be completed ASAP. This might displace older work, perhaps even pushing it to the lowest priority level where it may never get completed. That's fine, as if the work isn't important enough to be pushed by someone, perhaps it isn't needed.

To me, this is one of the advantages of working in a DevOps style flow, with small changes being developed and released. If clients start to use the feature and need additional development, we can continue to enhance the feature. If the users don't use it, which we know from either future requests or instrumentation (the latter is preferred), then we can put more effort into the areas that are more important to our organization.

With less waste.

We don't work on large projects to completion, wasting work on the parts of projects that will not be used. Instead, we complete small parts and keep shifting our focus to the areas that are most important to clients.