One alternative to using estimates for prioritizing work

is to invest in making experimenting and trying out ideas cheaper in order to sooner bring relevant data that can inform our decisions and reduce uncertainty as to what to prioritize and where to invest.

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Author's profile picture Dragan Stepanović

Estimating effort in a fully loaded system

is a poor man’s try of achieving predictability while eroding trust and jeopardizing psychological safety.

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Author's profile picture Dragan Stepanović

If it takes me 5 minutes to rename a method

and 1 hour to get a review and PR approval, that means the wait to processing time ratio is 60/5=12, and flow efficiency is only 7.7%.

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Author's profile picture Dragan Stepanović

When it comes to the way of working, there's one small difference that can make a huge impact on your teams and organization

With Pull Requests you see just a polished and thought-through end result.

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Author's profile picture Dragan Stepanović

Do you need to measure wait times and flow efficiency

if everyone that is needed is immediately available to respond (by #mobprogramming for example)?

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Author's profile picture Dragan Stepanović

If developers in your team have to repeat their asks or even worse beg 🙏

for reviewing their PRs (or any other help they need), your problem is not people not prioritizing other people’s work and lack of “team player spirit”.

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Author's profile picture Dragan Stepanović

If an organization compensates for ineffectiveness

by hiring more people, don’t be surprised to see the culture of ineffective parts of the organization eat away the culture of effective parts of the org, which doesn’t have a need to scale at such a rate.

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Author's profile picture Dragan Stepanović

The expectation that senior developers should be able to work independently is killing the team's ability to collaborate

The more they ask for help the less they feel they are meeting that expectation.

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Author's profile picture Dragan Stepanović

Measuring Accelerate metrics in XP teams is as redundant

as measuring code coverage for a team doing TDD.

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Author's profile picture Dragan Stepanović

Reducing transaction cost is necessary, but not a sufficient condition for reducing the batch size

Very often, for a mindset that emerged inside environments with big batches, it takes increasing the holding cost of inventory to start changing the belief system that was created as a workaround for the limitations of the system and served as its governing constraint.

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Author's profile picture Dragan Stepanović