Cycle Time as a Primary Measure

Mishkin Berteig has a great post up at his blog titled Measuring Process Improvements - Cycle Time. In it, he eloquently details why development teams should care about and manage cycle time. It complements nicely my First Law of Development and I encourage giving it a deep read.

People Laws (part 2)

This post continues the Laws of Development Physics as related to people elements that impact development.

People Laws (part 1)

“…when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in thought advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.”
                                                                                                                  - Lord Kelvin

“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains [...]

Pay Now or Pay Later

To follow up on the fourth law, I add as reinforcement the fifth law of development physics: 
If you cannot pay for variability reduction, you will pay in one or more of the following ways:

Long iteration times and high story points in progress

Wasted capacity or need for more resources

Slower burn down rates

Of course, the [...]

Eliminate Variability

Variability is the root of all evil in development and must be eliminated.

Tell Me a (Short) Story

Stories are the raw materials of development. They should stay in a raw form until needed. Or, as stated by the third “law of development physics”: The value of requirements increases as its production release becomes imminent. Or, you know what you need when you see it, until then, make up a good story.

The First Law of Development

In my post, What’s so Wrong with Pushing, I showed by analogy how Time Blocked Iterations, Story Points and Burn Down Rate enabled a superior pull mechanism over traditional management for development teams.  In this post, I’ll develop how to maximize results from that pull system.
There are three, sometimes opposing objectives in maximizing the effectiveness [...]

Cost of Software Defects

Is the cost of software defects driven more by time than the stage of its discovery?