Everything after the code is "done"I put "done" in quotes because in most orgs, code being written is maybe 20% of the journey. The other 80% is your code sitting in various queues, slowly ageing, like a forgotten sandwich in the office fridge.
author applies a Pareto division to software dev. Only the first 20% being writing the code. The rest, PR reviews, QA, waiting for next steps, getting it to market etc. is the other 80%
When you optimise a step that is not the bottleneck, you don't get a faster system. You get a more broken one.
The part of ToC often forgotten: if you optimise a step that isn't a bottleneck, then the entire system will get worse. You'll get pile-ups before the bottleneck, or idle wait times behind it.
In 1984, Eli Goldratt wrote The Goal, a novel about manufacturing that has no business being as relevant to software as it is. It's also the most useful business book you'll ever read that's technically fiction, which is almost the exact opposite of most KPI frameworks.The core idea is the Theory of Constraints, and it goes like this:Every system has exactly one constraint. One bottleneck. The throughput of your entire system is determined by the throughput of that bottleneck. Nothing else matters until you fix the bottleneck.
[[The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt]] 1984, on manufacturing and bottle necks in those processes. Software dev is not different by much. [[Critical Chain by Eliyahu Goldratt]] 1997 extended for project management. Vgl. Wolfgang Mewes Engpasskonzentrierte Strategie (EKS, 1971) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engpasskonzentrierte_Strategie
https://web.archive.org/web/20260405092911/https://andrewmurphy.io/blog/if-you-thought-the-speed-of-writing-code-was-your-problem-you-have-bigger-problems blogpost by Andrew Murphy on how code generation is not the bottle neck in software production, and thus through Theory of Constraints, adding AI vibing will make things worse because it puts pressure on all bottlenecks after the point of code making (while their speed was not the issue to begin with).