Agile meets Theory of Constraints (Christoph Steindl)

Agile software development has proven to be a good fit for knowledge work in environments of high change rates, often resulting in hyper-productive teams. The bottom line seems to be that applying agile methods to software development projects reduces risk and time-to-market while high quality is achieved at the same time.

On the other hand, process improvement programs often did not deliver on their promises. David Anderson took the lead with his book on "Agile Management for Software Engineering" to explain how agility and theory of constraints fit together.

When you consider software development or IT projects in general from the point of Theory of Constraints, you understand that trying to improve everyone and everything (like CMMI does when the entire organization tries to move up the maturity ladder) is inferior to identifying the constraint, exploiting the constraint and subordinating everything else to the constraint. When you consider software development or IT projects in general from the point of Theory of Constraints, you understand that trying to improve everyone and everything (like CMMI does when the entire organization tries to move up the maturity ladder) is inferior to identifying the constraint, exploiting the constraint and subordinating everything else to the constraint.

About the speaker

Christoph Steindl is a Senior IT Architect & Method Exponent at IBM in Vienna, Austria. He has been working for IBM since 2000 on a variety of software development and systems integration projects. His areas of expertise are in application development, software engineering, and methodologies. He is very knowledgeable about various agile methodologies and has given presentations about topics like Lean Software Development, Agile Project Management with Scrum, Supporting XP with Scrum, Distributed Agile, Test-Driven Development, Practical Use-Case Modeling, and Estimation in Agile Projects. He is an appointed lecturer at the Johnannes Kepler University in Linz (Austria) and at the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg (Austria), as well as a Certified ScrumMaster. He holds degrees for Computer Science and Mechatronics and a doctoral degree in technical sciences from the Johannes Kepler University in Linz.