Have Your Cake and Eat It, Too
Iron Triangle thinking means that engineers often feel stuck between prioritizing quality of code, speed (time to market), and cost. The fallacy of Iron Triangle thinking is believing that the parameters of these choices are fixed. When we believe that improving speed means necessarily sacrificing quality, cost, or both, we limit our potential for innovation.
The pervasiveness of Iron Triangle thinking means that many engineering leaders see only a hard trade-off between the cost and speed of a sprint-based (“agile”) development approach vs. a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) environment. They believe the competing demands of cost and speed are irreconcilable.
There’s a Better Way
As long as engineering leaders continue to subscribe to Iron Triangle thinking, we will never be provoked to ask ourselves if we can actually improve a process without making a trade-off. You can break the Iron Triangle of project management by structuring your improvement cycle not around trade-offs, but on continuous improvement, using data to maintain a test suite focused on your customers’ most commonly-used features.
Get the best of both worlds with a test suite that is agile AND continuous. Download the white paper to learn a new way of thinking.
