“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. 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 - LinearB, Typo, and UpLevel. Here’s the article by Abi Noda: On-Time Delivery Check out the original research paper here: Factors Affecting On-Time Delivery in Large-Scale Agile Software Development 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!