Do Agile and Theory of Constraints relate?

The answer is yes.  But since I don't work in that arena, I haven't been able to articulate the connection.

Dennis Stevens does it for us in his Theory of Constraints and Big Agile.  He goes through each of the Five Focusing Steps, describing the step in general and then applying it to an Agile development environment. 

This model is very interesting because if provides a thinking process for focusing efforts on the next most important problem. If our Agile team example above, if this model is not kept in mind by the team, they may spend time putting in a cool new CI environment – but unless that environment raises the constraint at B it will not result in an improvement. So it isn’t the next best place to focus. The other interesting thing about this model is that it scales up through the organization through the orders of scaling. If you haven’t read The Goal and Goldratt’s other writings you need to get this model into your thinking toolkit.

[Photo: "Agile workplace configuration..." by Wonderlane.]