Three Ways

 First Way : Flow

• Understanding the flow of work

• Increasing flow by understanding and removing constraints

• Never passing a known defect downstream

• Never allowing local optimization to cause global degradation

• Achieving a profound understanding of the entire system

A goal of The First Way is to have work flow quickly from left to right.

A methodology for identifying the most important limiting factor (i.e., constraint) that stands in the way of achieving a goal and then systematically improving that constraint until it is no longer the limiting factor.

The Theory of Constraints recognizes that

• Every process has at least one constraint or bottleneck that affects its ability to consistently meet its goal

• Improving constraints is the fastest and most efficient way to improve theentire process or system

Common Constraints :

• Development delays

• Environment creation (test, staging, production, etc.)

• Code deployment

• Test setup and run

• Security or QA assessments

• Overly tight architecture

• Product management

• Complex or bureaucratic processes

Second Way : FeedBack

• Understand and respond to the needs of all customers – both internal and external

• Shorten and amplify all feedback loops

• Create and embed knowledge where needed

A goal of The Second Way is to shorten and amplify right to left feedback loops so necessary corrections can be continually made.

Examples of Feedback Loops :

• Automated testing

• Peer review of production changes

• Monitoring/Event Management data

• Dashboards

• Production logs

• Process measurements

• Shared on-call rotation

• Change, Incident, Problem and Knowledge Management data

Third Way : Continual experimentation and Learning 

The Third Way encourages a culture that fosters two things: continual experimentation, taking risks and learning from failure; and understanding that repetition and practice is the prerequisite to mastery.

• Allocate time for the improvement of daily work

• Create rituals that reward the team for taking risks

• Introduce faults into the system to increase resilience

• Plan time for safe experimentation and innovation (hackathons)

Example :

• The ‘Simian Army’ concept was first adopted by Netflix as a service that randomly terminates a production instance

• Response to attacks helps to build competencies to recover the production environment from inevitable failures Getting stronger through failure is the basis of anti-fragility.