Why you need WIP limits
Why is this crazy person telling me to limit my WIP? As an agile coach I often come across situations where I need to encourage teams to reduce the amount of work they have in progress . Even though it sounds and feels counter intuitive to do less work, the fact is your team will get more DONE by doing fewer things at the same time. Activity != Progress In our scrum teams we naturally tend towards keeping everybody busy. Developers working on development tasks, testers working on testing tasks. History has skewed our mental model of what people should do at work so that we feel like we should always be busy, always processing work. This is a good model for the mass production of widgets or the processing of mountains of paperwork BUT a bad model for the production of complex, functional, high quality software. We use user stories to represent units of complex, functional, high quality software and in scrum the game is to finish a number of these units every spr