Dragan Stepanović

Reducing inventory accelerates the feedback, so THE way to build quality in is to reduce the inventory and thus shorten the feedback loop.

Same scene in Berlin U-Bahn (metro) this morning.

In systems with very short feedback loops there are almost no events. Everything seems to be boring. The longer the feedback loop, the more pressure builds up with time elapsed, the greater the sense of relief and achievement this produces on emotional level when the feedback loop is closed (marking an event that has just happened in the system). Ironically enough, watching for moments of relief and achievement says a lot about existence of events that are too big, which in turn reflects the existence of too long feedback loops.

Committing code very often and deploying to production with every commit is enabling constraint for getting better at incremental development, one of the most overlooked skills in software development.

Three very powerful questions to keep in mind when discussing a solution:

Let me unwrap that.

Actually, problem with silos is that by removing broader context in which they operate, people tend to locally optimize, which almost never produces overall outcomes that we initially wanted to achieve.

Instead of asking: “When is all this going to be done?”, why don’t we ask: “Why can’t we release what we have now?”.

I tend to think that there’s a correlation between the number of hand-offs and the need to visualize current work. The more hand-offs we have, the more there’s a need to answer the question: “where or with whom is this thing currently sitting with?”.

“Tell me how you measure me, and I will tell you how I will behave” – Eliyahu M. Goldratt