Unstated and not needed items in manufacturing parlance. Manufacturing Goods or products that are not required currently are never would be.
When applied to software parlance unnecessary features that are gold plated and never were part of customer requirement. Also some of the features that are not required currently and developed by the project team to be kept as library as artifacts and never used ever.
Examples
Heavy code base (as against lean code base)
Too much documents and work products
Trying to reach maximum normalization of the database systems creating performance issues
Many buffer resources present in the team contributing to non-required features and creating more dependencies for the core system.
Looking at the many of the commercial desktop software products most of the users hardly makes use of 50% of full features. It applies to even mobile phones. Not every user makes use of all the features of a mobile phone.
Over production some times complicates the maintenance because the extra features may create dependency with main required features making the whole product difficult to maintain and leading to under productivity issues.
Filed under: Lean
