How Do I Diagnose Software Delivery Friction?

Prerequisites

This guide assumes:

• Familiarity with Conway’s Law. Read What Is Conway’s Law? first if “communication structure shapes system structure” sounds new.
• A local clone of the repository you want to analyze. The diagnosis below is a git query.
• A POSIX shell withawk, sort, uniq, and cut. Standard on macOS and Linux.
• Visibility into the org chart. You need to map author emails to teams.

Rank the congestion candidates

Start by looking at the slowest, most contentious modules. Files with commits from many different authors over the last quarter signal congestion.