I read Principles of Product Development Flow recently and was very impressed. It gave me a mostly new, significantly orthogonal perspective with which to view the processes resulting in shipped code. The book, summarized, is:
Let’s apply queuing theory to software development!
If you learn nothing else, remember to reduce/control/watch/cost your queue sizes before other things you think are bottlenecks
Translate benefits and costs approximately into dollars. Especially the delay costs of a product sitting in a queue. You will likely be surprised.
Also here are dozens of more fine-grained considerations and interventions like how to push costly variance to someplace less costly, keeping superstar developers at lower load so they can firefight at whim, and the fact that variance isn’t always bad like it is on a factory floor.
I read Principles of Product Development Flow recently and was very impressed. It gave me a mostly new, significantly orthogonal perspective with which to view the processes resulting in shipped code. The book, summarized, is:
Let’s apply queuing theory to software development!
If you learn nothing else, remember to reduce/control/watch/cost your queue sizes before other things you think are bottlenecks
Translate benefits and costs approximately into dollars. Especially the delay costs of a product sitting in a queue. You will likely be surprised.
Also here are dozens of more fine-grained considerations and interventions like how to push costly variance to someplace less costly, keeping superstar developers at lower load so they can firefight at whim, and the fact that variance isn’t always bad like it is on a factory floor.