Throughout this series of articles I’ve explored how we need to bring the same rigor to architecting our software delivery value streams as what we’re witnessing in advanced manufacturing plants. Once we agree on what flows, we can analyze those flows to identify bottlenecks and opportunities to remove them. However, every time I’ve asked an executive-level IT leader where his or her bottleneck is, I’ve received either a blank stare or a vague answer, from otherwise extremely capable people.
To look for a bottleneck in a production system, we must first understand what flows through that system. We’ve seen many measures of software delivery flow proposed and analyzed, including lines of code (LOC), function points, work items, story points, deployments, and releases. Each captures a notion of value flow from a different perspective, but each has its limitations, especially when you consider the end-to-end flow of business value through a delivery pipeline. If my experience talking to IT leaders is a guide, from a business perspective, we simply don’t have enough consensus on this core question of what flows through a software value stream. Yet this should be the most fundamental question to answer if we are to apply lean principles to software delivery.
