3 years ago

Co-author of the “Lean Software Development,” Mary Poppendieck warned attendees of Agile Tour London in an end of day lean coffee that backlogs are a sign of an inefficient team. She says that since the output is almost always measured consistently by almost every organization, and that output is reasonably consistent over releases, that’s your only metric that matters.

You make a decision when somebody asks you to do something if you have the capacity to accept it, and your buffer in between is so short that you don’t have to decide what to do first, second and third.

What you want to do is have very new stuff that’s waiting to be done and a way to make that decision right away,” Mary said.

And that is especially true when you have kinds of systems you’ve never done before or the complexity of the domain is high.”