Comment by wry_durian
3 days ago
The book has a chapter about how to optimize variability in the product development process. The key idea is that variability is not inherently good nor bad, we just care about the economic cost of variability. There are lots of asymmetries in the payoff functions in the software context, so the area is ripe for optimization, and that means sometimes you'll want to increase variability to increase profit. But if we're mostly concerned that software development is too variable, there are lots of ways to decrease it, like pooling demand-variable roles, cross-training employees on sequentially adjacent parts of the product lifecycle, implementing single high-capacity queues, etc.
You seem knowledgeable in this area. I am slightly obsessed with this stuff ever since reading The Goal. Where can I learn more? For example, how can we use variability to create more profit? What are high-capacity queues?
One intuition for the variability argument comes from binary search, where you learn the most when you eliminate half the possibilities. You can apply the same logic to your product development or testing strategy by intending to fail more frequently. (In the testing context, this could look like testing at a higher level of integration.) This adds variability to the process but you will learn more and faster, which typically results in economic upside.
In terms of resources, Will Larson's An Elegant Puzzle hits on some of these themes and is very readable. However, he doesn't show much of his work, as it were. It's more like a series of blog posts, whereas Reinertsen's book is more like a textbook. You could also just read a queuing theory textbook and try to generalize from it (and that's where you'll read plenty about high-capacity queues, for example).
Thank you for this response really helpful. Generalizing from queue theory makes a lot of sense.