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value: anything of worth that the customer will pay for.
waste: anything the business does, or produces, that the customer will not pay for.
Scrum, and its practices, roles and meetings, are designed to help you visualize waste in your product development process and within your organization. In the language of Scrum, we call waste “impediments” or “obstacles”. It is very important to remove the obstacles because they are impediments to delivering value to your customer fast and impediments to self-organization and high-performing teams. As you become more comfortable with Scrum and your role as Product Owner, ScrumMaster or Team member, seeing waste will be one of the first breakthroughs of learning how to leverage Scrum to create real and lasting change.
In order to help you with seeing waste, I have used the work of Mary and Tom Poppendieck and their two books, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit and Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash, to create a list of seven common wastes of software development. Mary and Tom do a great job of mapping the Seven Wastes of Lean Manufacturing to software development and I encourage you to read their books if you want to know more about Lean Thinking applied to software.
The Seven Wastes of Software Development are listed to below to help open your eyes. As you read this list, make a note of the common wastes that you encounter each day and their impact on your work. I might even suggest that your consider showing this list to someone else in your organization and start a dialogue on what wastes are common in your business and how you might begin to remove them, or mitigate their impact.
Remember, if something does not directly add value as perceived by the customer, it is considered waste. If you can do without it, it’s waste.