Dan North & Associates Limited

Throughput

The Busy Kitchen - a parable of work in process

Some software teams get stuck because their business users don’t realise they need to make time to take delivery of features they’ve requested. Over time their User Acceptance Testing backlog increases to the point where the team’s throughput virtually stalls.

Are we nearly there yet?

The goal of software delivery is to minimise the lead time to business impact. Everything else is detail.

The lady in the taxi - a parable of metrics

Once upon a time there was a lady in a taxi. It took such a long time for the lady to get to her destination in the taxi that she went to the town hall and told the man from the council. The man from the council wanted to figure out why the taxi journey was so slow, so he placed cameras at all the traffic lights in the town to measure how many cars went past, and how quickly. The traffic light cameras would click every time a car went past the lights.