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Mary Poppendieck has published two new articles: Breaking the Quality–Speed Compromise and Managing the Pipeline. Mary is the co-author of the book Lean Software Development with her husband Tom Poppendieck. Mary has a great outlook on software development that comes from many years in the profession.

In Breaking the Quality-Speed Compromise, Mary explores the everyday understanding to increase the quality of design activity one must increase the time available for design. There are firms who break the time-quality trade-off and by doing so position themselves to take business away from others. Mary develops the case that high-quality software product development doesn't have to take time. She proposes:

"The most important thing we can do to break the compromises we impose on customers is to move testing forward and put it in-line with (or prior to) coding. In other words, find and fix the defects before they even count as defects."

This approach can apply to all design activity. The general principle is this: Establish the criteria for acceptance prior to doing the design work.

In Managing the Pipeline Mary proposes 6 Rules for reducing cycle time — guiding your projects based on queuing theory:

1. Limit work to capacity
2. Even out the arrival of work
3. Minimize the number of things-in-process
4. Minimize the size of things-in-process
5. Establish a regular cadence
6. Use pull scheduling

While Mary attributes these rules to queuing theory (from the field of Operations Research), we can find these rules in operation in the Toyota Production System. I don't argue with attribution. Rather, I suggest that all we need do is look to the world's most successful approach to product development and production for validation of Mary's proposals.

As usual, Mary writes well and persuasively. Have a look.