5 posts tagged with "engineering"

Your engineering team feels productive. Developers are coding, reviewers are reviewing, testers are testing. The flow board shows impressive activity with tasks moving through stages. Yet somehow, simple features take weeks to reach production, urgent fixes disappear into development black holes, and team velocity feels frustratingly slow despite everyone working hard.

The problem isn't lazy developers, bad code, or inadequate tools. The real culprit is something most teams can't see: invisible work queues that accumulate silently throughout your development pipeline and destroy velocity exponentially. Following Q1: The Principle of Invisible Inventory, these hidden bottlenecks are the root cause of most engineering productivity problems.

Understanding and eliminating invisible queues can transform team performance dramatically—often delivering 5-10x velocity improvements without adding resources or changing technical architecture. The key is learning to see what's hiding in plain sight.

Your engineering team feels busy, backlogs are full, and everyone's calendar is packed. Management celebrates 95% capacity utilization as peak efficiency. Yet somehow, nothing moves fast. Simple features take weeks, urgent fixes get delayed, and team morale drops despite hard work.

This scenario reveals a fundamental misunderstanding about team performance. Following Q3: The Principle of Queueing Capacity Utilization, high utilization doesn't create speed—it destroys it exponentially.

The mathematics are unforgiving: teams operating above 80% capacity utilization enter an exponential queue region where small increases in work create massive delays. Understanding this relationship transforms how we think about team productivity and sustainable velocity.

Fast-moving agile teams face a common challenge: bugs reaching production despite having solid workflows. Even with code reviews, staging environments, and automated deployments, issues still slip through. We experienced this problem firsthand and developed a systematic 4-task approach to reduce production bugs without sacrificing velocity.

Maintaining a monorepo poses a significant challenge in the long term, particularly when it comes to keeping packages up-to-date. With a large number of packages in our monorepo in play (some is updated less frequently than others) and the fast-paced nature of the JavaScript ecosystem, some packages may be outdated easily. This can result in two major issues: firstly, the less frequently updated packages may contain outdated dependencies with known vulnerabilities, and secondly, updating these dependencies can prove to be a difficult task when we need to work on a package that relies on them.

Welcome to ttoss, a tech company we created to improve efficiency and effectiveness in product development. Building products can be complex and time-consuming, and we want to help your business remove waste and streamline its operations. We can help your business achieve its goals and succeed in today's competitive market by providing the right tools and resources.