Bottlenecks in the Development Life Cycle of a Feature - A Case Study Conducted at Ericsson AB

Abstract

Increase in lead time of software projects has been mainly attributed to long development cycles and changes in customer requirements. This has driven the development of a number of modern software development strategies to address the issue. Among them is streamline development - an in-house development framework at Ericsson AB inspired by lean principles. In this paper we explore the development life cycle of a feature to identify the possible bottlenecks - a term used in lean development denoting interruptions, re-work or any activities that hinder the development process hence an increase in lead time. This paper is based on a case study carried out at one of the development unit at Ericsson AB. The results presented here are after a qualitative interview study with one cross function team using streamline development framework. Using lean as a theoretical base, the results show that: task switching, competence, delayed replies and feedbacks, limited follow ups of evaluations, long communication chains, limited knowledge on the feature usage, unclear understanding of the development process, and lack of documents describing the architecture for the team are some of the possible bottlenecks that can increase the lead time of a software project.