Unplanned Work and Rework

Unplanned work and rework represent a failure to build quality into software products.[¹]

Unplanned work and rework are valuable proxies for quality. Rework happens when the structure of the software or it design is an after thought. The avoidance in some Agile groups of *Upfront Design* leads some teams to believe that design is not needed.

Design happens any time an engineer touch a code-base wether they are aware of their changes or not.

“organizations which design systems. Are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations” (Conway 1968).

Arbitrary decisions proposed by frameworks and tools can lead to rework and unplanned work. Both represent quality and collaboration issues, the consequence is a significant increase in development costs.

[¹]: Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim(2021): Accelerate (https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations/dp/1942788339)