Video number three in our series designed to jump-start your understanding of the core practices and principles of Agile software engineering (ASE) is live—and all about flow. Flow is how we deliver value to the customer, and in the video, Lean-Agile thought leader Ken Pugh discusses how to accelerate flow in the Value Stream.

The flow in delivering a feature to a customer involves several phases—decide to deliver the feature, analyze the feature’s requirements, design, implement, test, and deploy. At this point in the Value Stream, when the software has been deployed, the customer provides feedback to let us know if we’ve created the right thing and what we should create next.

To ensure continuous flow, it’s important to identify process issues that slow delivery. Multitasking, delays between phases, and loopbacks are typical culprits. Of the latter, Ken describes several kinds—including one where a team realizes that it misunderstood a requirement and has to loop back to the analysis phase. Loopbacks slow delivery to the customer and constitute waste in needless rework.

Which brings us to minimizing waste as key to optimizing the Value Stream. A test-first mentality is one way to decrease loopbacks, and is the topic of an upcoming video in this series.

Watch the accelerating flow video here.

Check back next week for the fourth video in the series about testability, a key quality attribute.  

Go here to watch the previous video in the series about built-in quality.

Learn more about the Agile Software Engineering course here.   

Stay SAFe,

—Harry