One-piece flow and CD

Imagine a piece of work with a touch time of essentially 100%. Someone is always working on it; software rushes through the pipeline. Of course, people take breaks or have questions that need answers. Getting to a one-piece flow would mean having some way to define what the work does very early on; that isn’t always possible. And, in theory, it would mean zero backwash; the tester never finds any defects in exploration. We don’t always see that as possible. One way to accomplish this is to collapse the test and programming steps into one, with testers and programmers pairing together – or, in some cases, having the test-focused person be a more capable programmer. Pair programming struggles because companies tend to see it as two people doing one job. Dev/test pairing, on the other hand, has a higher success rate. With dev/test pairing, it is not two people doing one job, but instead two different activities being performed at the same time...