Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow

by Dominica Degrandis

David Anderson visited us monthly to teach us how to apply the Theory of Constraints (TOC) to our work in exchange for permission to write a story about the Corbis Agile transformation. TOC is a way to identify the most important limiting factor (the constraint) that stands in the way of achieving a goal and then systematically improving that constraint until it is no longer the limiting factor. There was much excitement while reading his book Agile Management for Software Engineering: Applying the Theory of Constraints for Business Results as we thought we would do Feature Driven Development, a type of Agile development focused on cross-functional, collaborative, and time-boxed activities to build features. As Darren Davis writes in his blog “The Secret History of Kanban,” David’s methods “...eliminated explicit estimation from the process, and relied on data to provide a probabilistic means of determining when software was likely to be done.”2