To support digital transformation imperatives, organizations are increasingly exploring DevOps style approaches for the continuous delivery of high quality software. Unfortunately, however, many enterprises remain burdened with accumulated technical debt and legacy wasteful practices – waste that can quickly inhibit the flow of value to customers and the business. Lean thinking provides organizations with a framework by which to quickly identify all forms of waste impacting the flow of value, which DevOps practitioners can apply in a software development context to quickly pinpoint and eliminate 8 elements of waste across people, process and technology dimensions.

This paper presents the 8 elements of waste framework, strategies needed to identify and eliminate waste, and the metrics needed to measure effectiveness.