Anyone who has ever dealt with Lean has probably encountered seven types of waste (Muda). Lean was originally created in Toyota for industrial manufacturing. That’s why it was initially harder for me to understand how I could apply this kind of waste to software production.
Personally, an article on the kanbanize.com website helped me a lot a few years ago. I started to collect more examples of waste, which I sorted into different categories. I came to the conclusion that such an overview would benefit every Scrum Master (and not just him). If you think about the structure of waste types, it will be easier for you to find their occurrence in your teams.
Take a look at the table of 7 types of waste, for each type there are always a few examples from the IT world.
 | Waiting for the subcontractor team to start addressing our request Waiting for prioritization results Waiting for the availability of the test environment Waiting for accesses Waiting for release |
 | Analysis that we will need in the future (maybe) Done but not deployed code Unused tools and licenses Preparation of extensive or duplicate documentation that is not used |
 | Defects in the production environment Technical debt |
 | Production of more and more functionalities without ongoing customer feedback Not cancelling a project/application that does not deliver value |
 | Sending SW bugs between systems when searching a solution, sometimes without further analysis (now it’s not my issue….) Frequent focus switching between many parallel projects and parallel tasks, broken focus Passing the request between many subcontractors (internal and external) |
 | Too strict rules for development (processes, methodology,…) Verry complex workflow in JIRA that everyone only skips when the request is done and they want to close it Too much focus on measurement and reporting |
 | Sending a completely finished request for approval back and forth over and over again Meetings that do not add value Distraction from work |
Do you want to learn more about types of waste (Muda, Mura and Muri) and increasing the efficiency of teams ? You can sign up for our Kanban training.
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