Lean Software Delivery: Synchronizing Cadence with Context

Daily, we are told that adopting agile, PaaS, DevOps, crowdsourced testing, or any of the myriad of current buzzwords will help us deliver better software faster. However, for the majority of software development organizations, naïve agile transformations that don’t look beyond the needs of developers will fail to produce the promised results. Mik Kersten says that instead of focusing on development alone to transform our software delivery, we must acknowledge the different contexts and mismatched cadences that define the work of business analysts, developers, testers, and project managers. For example, a developer working in an agile team may deliver code every two weeks, but the performance testing group may need more time for its work, while the operations group has a planned release cycle of once per quarter. To achieve optimum flow, which is the goal of end-to-end lean delivery, we must identify the different cadences of each group and interconnect the collaborators and their work—requirements, development, testing, and deployment.