Monitoring Bottlenecks in Agile and Lean Software Development Projects - A Method and Its Industrial Use

In the face of growing competition software projects have to deliver software products faster and with better quality – thus leaving little room for unnecessary activities or non-optimal capacity. To achieve the desired high speed of the projects and the optimal capacity, bottlenecks existing in the projects have to be monitored and effectively removed. The objective of this research is to show experiences from a mature software development organization working according to Lean and Agile software development principles. By conducting a formal case study at Ericsson we were able to elicit and automate measures required to monitor bottlenecks in software development workflow, evaluated in one of the projects. The project developed software for one of the telecom products and consisted of over 80 developers. The results of the case study include a measurement system with a number of measures/indicators which can indicate existence of bottlenecks in the flow of work in the project and a number of good practices helping other organizations to start monitoring bottlenecks in an effective way – in particular what to focus on when designing such a measurement system.