Pattern: you aren’t responding to change in time. Everyone is pushing to get more done.
Transformation: how would you reduce the variance in your work, even if that would “take longer”?
In Reduce Utilization we saw that pushing utilization too high impedes the ability to respond to new work. The other implication of Kingman’s Formula is that as variance increases the lead time for new work also rises to infinity. Reducing variance “magically” makes us more responsive.
Developer testing, for example TDD, reduces variance. When the programmer says the work is done, it’s (more likely) to be done, even though the programmer seems to be doing more work (whether it’s actually more work is up for debate).
Reducing coupling a la Tidy First? also reduces variance. We’re less likely to trigger those jackpot changes if we have less coupling. Even if tactically we might not need to decouple or cohere, we might invest strategically in software design to reduce historical sources of variance.