2. Agenda
• What does `the aggregation of marginal gains` mean?
• Could this improve the performance of our software engineering
team?
3. Sir Dave Brailsford
Ex-Performance Director, British Cycling
General Manager, Team Sky
By utilising marginal gains, these teams
saw considerable success..
6. –Sir Dave Brailsford
“The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down
everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then
improved it by 1%, you will get a significant increase when you put
them all together”
7. Sleep posture is important for an athlete
The team replaced the
mattresses + pillows in
every hotel room the
riders stayed in
12. Release early, release often…
We want the lightbulb (the Product Owner’s feature) to get round our ‘race track’
in the shortest possible time, but not at any cost. We want to:
1. Get a functioning lightbulb round the track (scope)
2. In the shortest time possible (velocity)
3. Without sacrificing the time for subsequent lightbulbs to get round the track
(quality)
23. We currently run entire cake + salvos before merge:
- this is dead time for a developer
- doesn’t expose poorly designed code to other members of the team
28. We define terminology to help us implement a feature
That same terminology will be used by the next person who works on
that feature
29. Treat terminology as a deliverable
Instantly resolve ambiguity you find:
>1 term to describe the same thing
>1 thing can be described with the same term
31. Surprises normally slow us down
It’s better to move from up-next > blocked, rather than ready-for-test
> blocked
32. Developer/Tester chat before up-next -> in-progress
is there any unclear terminology here?
is this a candidate for a smoke test?
does this rely on any 3rd party code?
is there any device-specific behaviour?
is there anything here that could be difficult to automate?
34. Your actions provide gains to other members of the team :)
You’ll experience gains because of someone else’s actions :)
However, to really understand performance we need measurements
35. –Sir Dave Brailsford
“We're in the right mindset, we're looking for little things,
collectively, all the time that's going to make us improve.”
collectively
Coined ‘Aggregated Marginal Gains’ in 2012
He sights it as the fundamental mechanism by which his racing teams were able to improve performance
As a result of improving performance, saw considerable success
The olympic medal haul jumped from 4 to 14 in 4 years
No british rider won the tour de france in 99 years
Team Sky have won it 3 times in 4
Sleeping posture is incredibly important for an athlete
21 stages, different hotel bed every night
Replaced mattresses, pillows and bedding for each athlete so they got the optimum nights sleep
I find the idea really intriguing
Googled around find that schools have been using it a few years to help students improve their performance
Lightbulb will ‘halt’ during the creation of these work products
Saves time, crack on with next task
Surfaces coupling in our code quicker + out in the open
Make it easier for the next people who come across that feature/scenario/domain to work on it
It will likely help you to design your implementation
