An Agile Mindset

Excessive Work In Progress (WIP) in Agile is associated with several problems that can negatively impact a team's performance and productivity. Money invested with no return : When a team starts multiple tasks or user stories at the same time, it is investing money, resources, and time into those items without seeing any return on that investment yet. This can lead to financial losses and missed opportunities for the business. Hides bottlenecks : Excessive WIP can hide bottlenecks in the development process and mask efficiency issues. When a team is working on multiple items at the same time, it is difficult to identify where delays are occurring and what is causing them. This makes it challenging to optimize the workflow and improve performance. Risk of rework : Excessive WIP also represents risk in the form of potential rework. When a team starts multiple tasks or user stories before completing others, it increases the likelihood of errors and inconsistencies that may require re...

Lead time is the total time it takes for a piece of work to be completed, from the point of initiation to the point of delivery. In Agile development, lead time is typically measured for user stories or features. So, this is the time from Backlog to all the way to "Done". Cycle time is the time it takes for a piece of work to be completed once it has started. In Agile development, cycle time is typically measured for individual tasks or technical work items e.g. time taken from "Dev in Progress" to "Acceptance test Start" Cycle time is a subset/part of the Lead Time. Cycle time is closely related to the work in progress (WIP) and excessive WIP can cause bottlenecks, delay, risk of money spent and re-work. Cycle time can be calculated by dividing WIP by throughput.  Cycle Time = WIP/Throughput  Throughput is the number of items that a team completes within a given period of time. It is a measure of how much work a team is able to accomplish. Both cycle ti...