Throughput and High Velocity

Wow… has it really be 11 months since I’ve blogged. I had many ideas for blogs half written or half thought out… but last year was extremely busy. It’s a new year… and I’m back :) Let’s not focus on the past, let’s get right into it.

I had a client recently asking how to improve throughput. It took me a few minutes of questioning to understand what the subject really was. Thoughtput? Are you having scaling issues? It turns out, the interest is closer to developer throughput, although I don’t think they used that term and it may have been broader than that. The interest is in the acceleration of moving an idea into a product. Immediately coming to mind is the book “The Goal”, whose focus it is to increase the throughput of a manufacturing plant. Although the creation of software is nothing like an assembly line (although the analogies seem to be common place), it is however interesting to consider some of the similarities involved with the theory of constraints. The challenge is, in my opinion, that the constraints for software development are more virtual and harder to measure than assembly line constraints.

Consider what slows down the development of software. Of all my years of software development, the issue has never been an issue of programmer to keyboard. In other words, it isn’t how you type or how fast you type, although it certainly needs to be reasonable. It often times isn’t how long a developer has been developing… although again there is a required threshold. Where have there been issues? Let’s see if you list is similar to my list:

• Poorly written requirements. The user seems to know what they want, but was unable to communicate it effectively or the BA was unable to capture it appropriately.
• Lack of direction, mission and purpose of the entire team… either we have too much time, too much money or a total lack of leadership. Let’s chalk this up to priorities.
• Lack of knowing what to do next… BA or programmer… or PM
• Lack of knowing how what a programmer is working on fits into the whole
• Lack of team coordination
• Large team sizes

I’m sure there are plenty more… but what I would say is the #1 issue for teams in trying to achieve high velocity is clarity of thought. I mean the ability to see a problem as the user sees the problem. Being able to see a solution and understand the problem in abstract terms and abstract ways; For a team to have the same thought or to hold within their minds the same mental model / picture. This is a tough task as differing priorities, differing locations, differing experiences and differing thoughts among the team members results in a number of differing ideas to the solution. It brings to mind to me of the scene in the last samurai, where Koyamada tells Tom Cruise “Too Many Mind”… “No Mind”

As Dr. Covey says in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (which is what we are talking about… right?), you must start with the end in mind. Clarity positions people to be as effective as they can be. In the real world, a user really may not have the clarity themselves or may not understand the problem fully to articulate the desired clarity. This is why an agile development process is so effective. It provides an opportunity for the user to discover the clarity through regular feedback with the developers. Or in other words to detect deltas in the forming solution from the ideal or user desired solution. It also places the developer close to the user, so that through the creation of software when the output drifts from the user mental model it is caught quickly and corrected. Also developers are pairing with, and communicating with other developers regularly so that differences in the mental model are detected early.
What we are seeking for efficiencies sake is the fastest mechanism to detect that something is just not right.

So at the time of development what are the common practices that occur in a corporate development which cause inefficiencies or put another way what are the practices that cause the error detection to be delayed, either the detection itself is delayed or the communication of the detection is delayed.

• Developers are several degrees removed from the user. So there are either 2 human “hops” for error recognition and for communication.
• Developers are too junior. Junior developers are just less capable of thinking and communicating in abstract software terms and are less able to detect deficiencies in the solution model.
• Separation of the team members. Numerous studies show the increase cost of communication of people in just 2 different rooms, its more expensive for 2 different floors and way expensive when there is an ocean between members of the team. There is an additional cost that isn’t well documented in the fact the difference in the mental model or solution set are very difficult off-shore.
• Communication is all facilitated through paper. This is the worse of all the communication modalities.

So what can you do to increase throughput? What can you do to increase team velocity?

1. Hire highly skilled developers, developers skilled in their language who also have a proven record of quickly translating problem sets into solution sets.
2. Provide them with quick, and easy access to the user
3. Put the developers in the same work space
4. Reduce the team size, which results in less possibilities of mental model differences.

You are looking for a team with a high attention to detail and ability to detect differences in the mental model during the development process. Then you are looking for well-lubricated spontaneous communication.

This isn’t fool proof but it does solve one of the largest most common problems I see in corporate software development.