Amplify Speed and Quality of Learning Cycles

Description

Understand and work to reduce the elapsed time taken to understand the impact on the overall product system due to changes made by individual contributors. The value of "Learning" is a function of both the speed of the feedback and its quality.

As an example, the scope for practices such as Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery should incorporate the overall product system. A team may continuously integrate within a team-limited subset of the overall product system to optimise the speed of feedback, but this can not be considered fully integrated. Incrementally improve collaboration, infrastructure, automation, tools and processes across all teams to reduce the effort and time taken to understand the broader impact of changes made from within individual teams.

Rationale

Fast feedback loops increase the rate of learning and reduce the cost and scale of “failure”. Agile teams usually apply practices such as Continuous Integration to reduce the time between making a change and validating whether it breaks something.

If there is a high-effort and time-consuming process to deploy and validate changes to the system then this encourages infrequent and large batch size deployments. This behaviour increases risks of inconsistent and difficult-to-merge inter-team changes, increased rework and delays in learning. A low "Cost of transaction" will encourage more regular and smaller incremental changes to the system.

Relevance at Scale

Scaling to multiple teams often leads to slower feedback loops, leading to slower learning and a higher cost of failure and greater rework.

An effort to increase levels of individual team autonomy and efficiency can lead to teams independently working against isolated branches of the system and environments, leading to delayed integration with the work of other teams.

Related Links

• Use the Definition of Done as an enabling constraint
• Maximise the Scope of Product Increment
• Regular small changes: Scale the number of changes rather than the size
• Invest in quality
• Create a Learning Organisation
• Cultivate learning between teams
• Create the environment for people to thrive
• Favour teams with maximised cognitive diversity