Delivery cadence
Even with cross-functional, autonomous teams, you'll still have some interdependencies and communication flow occurring between the teams. In the first chapters of this book, when I explained the flow of work and metrics, I focused on efficiency, flow, batch size, and a continuous delivery value. But you still need some cadence to control your flow. In Scrum, this is called empirical process control. After a certain time, you pause to inspect and adopt – not only what you deliver but also your process and team dynamics. This time span is called a sprint in Scrum. I don't like that term because it implies a fast pace, and development should have a constant, steady pace. You don't sprint if you want to run a marathon – and product development is a marathon and not a series of sprints (but a marathon does not match with the analogy of rugby, of course). But no matter what you call these intervals, they are important for continuous learning...
