Stop Starting, Start Finishing - Eliminate task switching
Mendelson Amir
Optimizing Software Development Processes (Scrum, Agile) with Evidence-Based Decision Making.
This post presents a simple and practical idea that aims at improving your software development process.?
The takeaway
Task switching is killing your productivity - Identify and eliminate them.
Why is task switching killing your productivity? ?How to identify and eliminate them? This post will give you the answers to the above questions.
Agile – “Stop Starting, Start Finishing”
As you probably know, one of the slogans usually recognized related to Agile is – “Stop Starting, Start Finishing”.?
The main reason for applying this mindset in software development is to support Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) processes: User Stories are delivered, deployed, and tested immediately after they are ready. This is one of the most powerful ideas behind DevOps.??
Switching from one task without finishing it, to another task will prevent the organization from having a real CI/CD automated pipeline.??
About task switching - Daniel Kahneman
Here is an observation about task switching made by Daniel Kahneman (Daniel Kahneman is the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences known for his work on the psychology of judgment decision-making, and behavioral economics):
“One of the significant discoveries of cognitive psychologist in recent decades is that switching from one task to another is effortful, especially under time pressure. “
Daniel Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and Slow.
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How to identify and eliminate task switching
Using a “REAL” Kanban board will assist you identify and eliminate unnecessary task switching in your process
Generally speaking, a “REAL” Kanban board should always contain at minimum the following features:?
As presented in the below image:
If you do not have ALL those features in your Kanban board, I recommend reading “Agile Project Management with Kanban by Eric Brechner” and adapt your project management process to the recommendations made there.
Identify the task switching
Having swim lanes per team members will help you identify if there are task switching issues in your sprint
Ideally each swim lane should have not more than one active user story:???????
Note that the classical (and important) WIP limit control that is conducted vertically for each active & done state is unchanged !. We have just added another control measure (using horizontal swim lanes) to help us identify and eliminate the task switching. ?????????
Eliminate the task switching
Eliminating the task switching can be conducted by limiting the active user stories to one per swim lane.?