Continuous delivery and the Theory of Constraints

Adopting continuous delivery takes time: you have a long list of technology and organisational changes to consider. You have to work within the unique circumstances of your organisation. You're constantly surrounded by strange problems, half-baked theories, off the shelf solutions that just don't work, and people telling you they've worked here for 23 years and Amazon is nothing to worry about. How do you identify and remove the major impediments in your build, testing and operational activities? How do you avoid spending weeks, months or years on far-reaching changes that ultimately have no impact on your time to market? The Theory of Constraints is a management paradigm that describes how to improve throughput in a homogeneous workflow. It can be applied to continuous delivery in order to locate, prioritise and reduce constrained activities until a flow of release candidates to production is achieved. In this session, Steve Smith will explain how easy it is for a continuous delivery programme to be unsuccessful, how the Theory Of Constraints works, how to apply the Five Focusing Steps to continuous delivery, and how to home in on the constrained activities that are your keys to success. The session includes tales of glorious failures and ignominious successes.