What Flows through a Software Value Stream?

Most enterprise IT organizations don’t have a well-defined productivity measure for what flows through their software production process. No clear consensus exists from academia or industry thought leaders on what constitutes software development productivity. Organizations know it when they see it—for example, through products that drive market adoption faster than others. But correlating development activities to those results has been more of an opaque art than a disciplined activity. To define productivity in a value stream, we must first define what flows.