Each successive improvement is increasingly subtle relative to the previous improvements. Product development organizations usually have to first start seeing signs of emerging entropy before they have the necessary context to consider new, subtle improvements.
When a product development organization starts sensing entropy, its first decision should be to decide when it needs to act upon it, rather than to decide to presume to begin to act upon it immediately. Acting too early can mean that the team might be acting without sufficient context and understanding of the sources of entropy.
If the team recognizes frustration with its current ability to perform, and if it has some shared understanding of its constraints, then it can potentially begin to remove the constraints immediately.
The following are common issues for agile teams, and represent areas where bottlenecks and entropy collect:
- Code. Code is often written merely to work and to execute, without consideration for the waste incurred by forcing teammates to decipher code in order to get at its purpose, and to work with it. Code is one of the primary means of communication on an agile team. It must be written to communicate to other programmers on the team, and must quickly generate understanding.
- Design and Architecture. Systems and software work but are not readily understandable and adaptable by all members of the team. A small set of well understood and familiar patterns are often over-used. Object-oriented design fundamentals are often esoteric and impenetrable during the building of a first or second-generation product. Developers come to understand their significance often only by introducing design friction that is only seen in retrospect as a series of violations of software design laws and principles.
- Tests. Initially, teams tend to craft tests as quality assurance efforts rather than design, specification, and documentation efforts. Tests should be easy to scan, enabling developers to get an immediate understanding of the system and the impact of the work they need to do, as well as an understanding or where to find their work site (or sites) within the code and supporting artifacts. Tests are the most important form of documentation on an agile team.
- Development and QA Test Synchronization. Without greater synchronization between development and QA testing, valuable input often comes too late in a development or release cycle to be effective. Test design and test architecture are valuable inputs to development, and software design and architecture are valuable inputs to QA testing. Teams often loose unrealized capacity by not pursuing means to do more development and testing in parallel.
A critical mass is inevitably reached and the team makes course corrections that are often broader than the iteration-to-iteration practice and tool calibrations.
