One of the main planks of lean thinking is the elimination of waste from the process of delivering value to the customer. Hal Macomber writes a very interesting piece about waste in communication.

When applied to software development, this idea fits very well with the agile view that interaction and collaboration are to be valued more highly than documentation, for example. In Lean Software Development Mary & Tom Poppendieck classify the muda of document hand-off under Ohno’s original heading of extra processing steps, and I tend to agree. But maybe Hal is right, and Poor Communication (not listening, not speaking) genuinely is a new category of waste…