Measuring Software Development Waste in Open-Source Software Projects

Software Development Waste (SDW) is defined as any resource-consuming activity that does not add value to the client or the organization developing the software. SDW impacts the overall efficiency and productivity of a software project as the scale and size of the project grows. Although engineering leaders usually put in effort to minimize waste, the lack of definitive measures to track and manage SDW is a cause of concern. To address this gap, we propose five measures, namely Stale Forks, Project Diversification Index, PR Rejection Rate, Backlog Inversion Index, and Feature Fulfillment Rate to potentially identify unused artifacts, building the wrong feature/product, mismanagement of backlog types of SDW. We apply these measures on ten open-source projects and share our observations to apply them in practice for managing SDW.