I found the following to be the main point of the article:
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You might think that puts us in an impossible position when it comes to deciding how to run teams. But consider why software development is not a regular environment, and why it is so hard to run experiments, to acquire skills, and to measure which practices and decisions lead to success, and which to failure. The root cause in all these cases – the reason the environment is not regular – is that the feedback loop between making a change and understanding the result of that change is too long. The word “change” here should be understood very generally to mean change in requirements, change in methodology, change in development practices, change in business plan, or code or configuration change.
There are many benefits to reducing cycle time – it’s one of the most important principles that emerges when we apply Lean Thinking to software development. Short cycle times are certainly essential for creating great products: as Bret Victor says in his mind-blowing video Inventing on Principle, “so much of creation is discovery, and you can’t discover anything if you can’t see what you’re doing.”
But for me this is the clincher: It’s virtually impossible for us to practice continuous improvement, to learn how to get better as teams or as individuals, and to acquire the skills that enable the successful creation of great products and services – unless we focus on getting that feedback loop as short as possible so we can actually detect correlations, and discern cause and effect.
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Jez seems to believe that Development Methodologies suck when they reach the point of getting in the way of developers creating things and when you have long cycle times before you can see the fruits of your labor, wonderful ideas are potentially lost. One of the important aspects of Continuous Delivery is to reduce that feedback loop as much as possible - people start to do amazing things and create wonderful ideas with immediate results to the changes they are making.
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You might think that puts us in an impossible position when it comes to deciding how to run teams. But consider why software development is not a regular environment, and why it is so hard to run experiments, to acquire skills, and to measure which practices and decisions lead to success, and which to failure. The root cause in all these cases – the reason the environment is not regular – is that the feedback loop between making a change and understanding the result of that change is too long. The word “change” here should be understood very generally to mean change in requirements, change in methodology, change in development practices, change in business plan, or code or configuration change.
There are many benefits to reducing cycle time – it’s one of the most important principles that emerges when we apply Lean Thinking to software development. Short cycle times are certainly essential for creating great products: as Bret Victor says in his mind-blowing video Inventing on Principle, “so much of creation is discovery, and you can’t discover anything if you can’t see what you’re doing.”
But for me this is the clincher: It’s virtually impossible for us to practice continuous improvement, to learn how to get better as teams or as individuals, and to acquire the skills that enable the successful creation of great products and services – unless we focus on getting that feedback loop as short as possible so we can actually detect correlations, and discern cause and effect.
==================================
Jez seems to believe that Development Methodologies suck when they reach the point of getting in the way of developers creating things and when you have long cycle times before you can see the fruits of your labor, wonderful ideas are potentially lost. One of the important aspects of Continuous Delivery is to reduce that feedback loop as much as possible - people start to do amazing things and create wonderful ideas with immediate results to the changes they are making.