An agile software team optimizes its processes and approaches until it has removed the constraints that limit its performance relative to its goal.
Every new level of performance brings a new constraint to solve, and that new constraint is appropriate to the team's new level of performance.
An optimized team performs at an increasing degree of tolerance, and finer tolerances bring subtler constraints. At higher speeds, these new subtle constraints cause as much oscillation as the previous, more concrete constraints at slower speeds.
There's oscillation at every level of performance, and each level's oscillation is the tattle tail of a bottleneck that obstructs the team from working to the extent of its potential.
Without continuous improvement, any performance level's inherent obstruction will allow entropy to accumulate, and cause the team and the surrounding organization to begin to loose its ability to perform to the expectations that it has set previously.
The next level of success surfaces the next risk to performance. Complacency with success with our last optimization will be the ultimate source of a team's degrading performance.
Agile teams swim against entropy's current. They improve or they backslide.
Nothing fails like success if we allow ourselves to believe that ultimate success isn't made of a continuous series of successes at ever-finer levels of understanding and action.
Every new level of performance brings a new constraint to solve, and that new constraint is appropriate to the team's new level of performance.
An optimized team performs at an increasing degree of tolerance, and finer tolerances bring subtler constraints. At higher speeds, these new subtle constraints cause as much oscillation as the previous, more concrete constraints at slower speeds.
There's oscillation at every level of performance, and each level's oscillation is the tattle tail of a bottleneck that obstructs the team from working to the extent of its potential.
Without continuous improvement, any performance level's inherent obstruction will allow entropy to accumulate, and cause the team and the surrounding organization to begin to loose its ability to perform to the expectations that it has set previously.
The next level of success surfaces the next risk to performance. Complacency with success with our last optimization will be the ultimate source of a team's degrading performance.
Agile teams swim against entropy's current. They improve or they backslide.
Nothing fails like success if we allow ourselves to believe that ultimate success isn't made of a continuous series of successes at ever-finer levels of understanding and action.
