A Matter of Waste

If a queue has a capacity of 100 units, we may enqueue 10 entities with a volume of 10 units per entity. 10 times 10 equals 100, right?

If we find a parking space with exactly the same length as our car, our search will come to an end - assuming the parking car must be parked parallel to the sidewalk. Right?

Hmmmh, the last one does not feel right. But what is the problem? It is that we need some additional space to maneuver. This extra space could be considered as waste, but it is in fact a precondition for parking operations. We may call this quality attribute "parkability".

A similar problem is the issue of a rectangular container with a volume of 100 ought to be filled with 100 spheres of volume 1 each. Obviously, we can't expect 100 spheres to fit into a container with the size of all spheres summed up. Again, the challenge is caused by inherent extra space needed by spheres.

Do we encounter such challenges in software design as well? Of course!
To be precise, we experience "waste" in two different areas: in our own activities as engineers and in our systems.

Let me start with the latter one that is primarily caused by technology and design constraints as well as by inherent properties of the problem domain. If you got this cool new 64-core machine with Terabytes of RAM, you may want to increase the efficiency of your apps by 64 times. Unfortunately, waste comes into our way again. Competition for resources and inherent dependencies in the problem context will cause the performance increase to be significantly lower than the desired factor of 64. And we did not even consider accidental complexity in this scenario.

Interestingly, it is such dynamic overhead that makes it difficult to deal with operational qualities or to build realistic simulators.

But how does this waste issue relate to software engineering activities? Basically, it is the same calculus again.

If we are committed to two different activities with overlapping time spans that need our attention, there is a chance of conflicts. Two ressources are competing for your time. As you cannot focus on two activities at the same time, you'll have to focus on one, which leads to a kind of time debt in the other one.

Another approach is switching back and forth between two activities. However, this requires the engineer to stay synchronized with the current state of each activity. Experts in multithreading call this "context switch". Time needed for such housekeeping duties inevitably causes waste.

Another typical root of waste is when a consultant or engineer of a company is supporting a custumer, because it is necessary to deal with two organizations such as organizational overhead for vacation, payments, ordering items, time accounting, meetings.

Often engineers do not consider such overhead, because they underestimate the problem instead of making waste explicit and finding ways to reduce it. But keep in mind: It is impossible to remove all waste, in particular inherent one.

Experience tells us that at least (!) one fifth of time allocated to an activity will be consumed for "non productive" issues. Thus, we always need to explicitly add a waste factor representing idle time.

Another reason for waste is communication. Think about reading mail, joining meetings, handling phone calls, chating with colleagues, drinking coffee. In a magazine I recently read that such interrupted work is a major issue in companies causing incredible amounts of overhead. This is due to the fact that when humans are experiencing a non maskable interrupt they'll need to reboot their brain before refocusing and continuing with the interrupted work.

So, if you need to reduce productivity of colleagues significantly play the interrupt game. Tom DeMarco once told me about two printer companies in the US where he could relate meeting time and productivity. The more (mandatory) meetings the less productive a company will be. Maybe, this pattern could be called "death by meetings". If you appreciate further patterns, start reading Dilbert by Scott Adams.



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