"On-Time Delivery" by Abi Noda

Did you know that on average, software projects run around 30% overtime?

Abi Noda has summarised the study “Factors Affecting On-Time Delivery in Large-Scale Agile Software Development” by researchers from the Delft University of Technology. The researchers have identified 25 factors that affect the on-time delivery of epics (surveys taken using software repository data from 185 teams).

Requirements Refinement, Task Dependencies, Organizational Alignment, Organizational Politics & Geographic Distribution of Teams are the factors that have been identified as having the most significant impact.

How can one reduce the development time to ensure on-time delivery?

1. Clearly define tasks, give room to handle edge cases, ensure regular delivery & use agile practices.

2. Regularly track code quality & investment distribution and identify bugs/blockers & insufficient testing.

3. Keep your team goals aligned with business goals & trust your team to come up with realistic timelines.

4. Give/receive continuous feedback, and track your developers’ well-being/burnout levels.

5. Integrate your dev tools (like Jira, and Git) & communication channel (like Slack) with an engineering metrics analysis tool that uses DORA metrics along with the SPACE framework.

6. Encourage pair programming & use a framework such as ReactJS/Angular. This will help to reduce the gap b/w teams and give you a better idea of why you’re going overtime.
   Recommended tools - Sleuth, Typo, and Waydev.

Here’s the article by Abi Noda: https://newsletter.abinoda.com/p/on-time-delivery?utm_source=pocket_saves

Check out the original research paper here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9503331

How do you measure your software development overtime %? And what strategies/tools do you use to reduce it?

Let me know in the comments below!