Piles point out your problems

When you’re trying to optimize the flow of work, be on the lookout for piles.

Examples of piles

• Piles of bugs.
• Backlogs full of stuff.
• Unmerged engineering work.
• Piles of work waiting for QA.
• Work that needs to be reviewed.

Piles, piles, piles.

Why focus on piles?

Product development, and many forms of work, become more efficient as they become more continuous. Piles often point to where the inefficiencies in your system are. So every time you notice a pile, note it carefully as a potential bottleneck of the team.

Theory of constraints

The theory of constraints says that any manageable system is limited in achieving its goals by a very small number of constraints.

It is essential to optimize the part of the system that is a constraint. Otherwise, you risk making the problem worse.

Think of it like traffic. If you have a tunnel that is constraining traffic, adding another 3 lanes of traffic leading up to the tunnel isn’t going to make your traffic better. In fact, it will slow things down, because the tunnel bottleneck will become more acute.

Focus on the tunnel. Focus on your bottlenecks. Focus on your piles.

Agent based coding and piles

I’m seeing this in many places that are adopting agent based coding. For some reason, it’s not speeding up the delivery of the team that much? Why?

Although speeding up coding seems desirable, it may not be your true constraint. Or it may shift the constraint to code review or some other place. Focus on your constraints.

Podcast on this topic

Thank you

The book that helped me be sensitized to piles was the fabulous but very challenging book, The Principles of Product Development Flow.

Image by Gidon Pico from Pixabay