Clean is Fast

No one argues that clean is fast. We argue about the detergents. 

Instead of cutting scope and quality, we should cut the waste in our development process through active collaboration.

As regularly as I let my desk get quickly cluttered, I get into a real pain to see a software development team trying to deliver quality software in an organisation cluttered with inefficient practices.

What makes a development process efficient? The lack of inefficiencies. 

What is the source of inefficiency? Distrust and misunderstanding.

How to fix it? With active, diverse and inclusive collaboration.

Nothing should be too technical for the business, and nothing should be too non-technical for the engineers.

We’re all dependent on each other. The more we actively work together, instead of asynchronously answering questions on Slack or in Jira in a two-screen-scroll list of comments, the faster we’ll deliver high-quality software. 

More person-hours per task decrease calendar time.

Make sure everyone who cares about that feature is at the table – sales, marketing, account managers, customer support, test, dev, UX, product, DevOps, the Customer… who else? 

Does it waste everyone’s time and inhibit their flexible work hours? No! What is a waste of time is the waiting time between the stages of each task, waiting for clarification, reprioritisation and re-elicitation.