Symptoms for Managers

These are the symptoms that show up in sprint reviews, quarterly planning, and 1-on-1s. They manifest as missed commitments, quality problems, and retention risk.

Unpredictable delivery

• Everything Started, Nothing Finished - The team reports progress on many items but finishes few. Sprint commitments are routinely missed because work that seemed “almost done” stalls.
• Work Items Take Days or Weeks to Complete - Estimates are consistently wrong. A “3-day story” takes two weeks. Forecasting becomes unreliable.
• Releases Are Infrequent and Painful - The organization can only ship quarterly because each release requires weeks of stabilization. Business opportunities are lost to lead time.
• Hardening Sprints Are Needed Before Every Release - The team needs dedicated time to “harden” before every release. This hidden cost is not visible in velocity metrics.

Quality reaching customers

• Production Issues Discovered by Customers - Customers report bugs before the team knows about them. Each incident erodes trust and creates unplanned support work.
• Staging Passes but Production Fails - The team followed the process - tests passed, staging looked good - but production still broke. The process gives false confidence.
• High Coverage but Tests Miss Defects - The team reports strong test coverage numbers, but defects keep reaching production. The metric is not measuring what it appears to measure.
• Production Problems Are Discovered Hours or Days Late - Problems are not detected until the blast radius has grown. The mean time to detect is measured in hours or days, not minutes.

Coordination overhead

• Multiple Services Must Be Deployed Together - Deploying requires coordination across teams and services. This creates scheduling dependencies and increases the cost of every change.
• Merge Freezes Before Deployments - Development stops before each release so the team can stabilize. This idle time is invisible but costly.
• The Team Is Afraid to Deploy - Deployments are treated as risky events. The team prefers to batch and delay rather than ship frequently, which amplifies risk.

Team health and retention

• Team Burnout and Unsustainable Pace - Process friction, on-call burden, and deployment stress are wearing the team down. Attrition risk is high.
• Merging Is Painful and Time-Consuming - Developers spend significant time resolving merge conflicts instead of building features. This is invisible overhead that slows delivery.
• Pull Requests Sit for Days Waiting for Review - Developers are blocked waiting for reviews. This creates frustration and drives up work-in-progress as they start new things while waiting.
• It Works on My Machine - Environment inconsistency means developers waste time debugging problems that only appear in certain environments. This is preventable friction.

What to do next

If these symptoms sound familiar, these resources can help you build a case for change and find a starting point:

• Phase 0: Assess - Map your value stream, take baseline measurements, and identify your top constraints.
• DORA Capabilities - The research-backed capabilities that predict delivery performance. Use this to connect symptoms to organizational capabilities.
• Metrics Reference - Definitions for the metrics used throughout this guide, including the four DORA metrics.
• FAQ: How long does the migration take? - Rough timelines for each phase of the migration.
• FAQ: What if our organization requires CAB? - How to move from manual change approval to automated evidence.