Optimizing Software Engineering Pipelines
I recently finished “The Goal” by Eliyahu Goldratt. For a business book, it’s extremely entertaining. “The Goal” is written like a novel, with some business nuggets awkwardly dropped in. If you can get past some of the corny setup questions so that a business definition can be explained, then the book is an excellent read. The audiobook is also very well done.
“The Goal” is about maximizing profits for a factory. The factory has raw materials and needs to use its internal pipeline to generate revenue. Along the way are lots of lessons about bottlenecks, inventory, and efficiency. While interesting, it doesn’t immediately translate to software engineering or startups in general. After all, startups aren’t always about maximizing profits. Oftentimes, startups are actually losing money, on purpose. Obviously, there isn’t really any equipment to manage, since software development is basically all humans converting caffeine into code. “The Goal” actually can teach us a lot, we just need to do some translation. For an established company, we can just keep “profit” as the main goal. For a startup, we might pick a different metric: active users. For the rest of our thought experiment, let us assume active users are our main goal, and what we are actually doing is converting capital investments into active users.
In “The Goal”, one of the first lessons is about dependencies in your pipeline. The book uses a story about boy scouts walking in a single-file line to explain The Accordion Effect. But I find traffic to be much more relatable:
