The first principles of DevOps - Principles of Flow - mandate to make all flows (processes, partial Value Streams) within an organization visible.
Within DevOps Organizations, the work flows from development to operations. From customer request to production. From left to right.
Applying this principle results in transparency of the flows in all pipelines. This allows for optimization of all pipelines globally. This in turn allows for fast flow of all (independent, local) tasks.
Opposing to a physical manufacturing environment, where piled up or halted flow is plainly visible, this is not the case for software development or related services. Here, the negative factors that impact the flow are not natively visible and extract effort must be undertaken to identify them.
Using Kanban boards is one of the tools that help visualizing work and flow.
With the work and flow visible, all Work in Progress can be identified, analyzed and subsequently removed.
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