XP practices to rule the flow


Building quality in and fast flow cannot happen without short feedback loops.
And prerequisites for short feedback loops are high flow efficiency and low inventory.

Leading indicator of high flow efficiency is low WIP limit. Leading indicator of low inventory is small batch size.

That’s all you need.

I know. Easier said than done 😊 The road is definitely challenging, but out of all the things that a team and org can focus on there are only two practices that guarantee fast flow with high quality.

Limiting WIP and batch size reduction.

And in product development teams I’m almost certain that without XP practices you won’t be able to pull those off.

  • Mobbing/Pairing enable limiting WIP.
  • TDD, Refactoring, and Simple Design enable batch size reduction.

I just don’t know for any other software development practices that are able to achieve this. If you happen to know, would be glad to hear about it.