Why are your socks on the floor again?
I don’t know.
Don’t say “I don’t know!”
How many times have I told you to turn off the light when you leave a room?
I don’t know.
Don’t say “I don’t know!”
Tag: fear
For the love of stress
This tweet resonated with me:
The comment applies to the author’s area of focus, but the pattern she observes occurs broadly in our field. How is it possible circa 2019 that the majority of people in the software field are not routinely using:
- rolling-wave planning to avoid premature investment in undeveloped ideas and to enable business flexibility/agility?
- flexible funding models to avoid locking up funds in early, long-term budget allocations?
- product-oriented experiments to steer development work toward target capabilities, as opposed to a portfolio of projects with rigid, predefined objectives and timelines?
- collaboration with stakeholders, Specification by Example, Personas, Story Mapping, etc. to understand user needs?
- cross-disciplinary collaboration to build solutions, including cross-functional teams, sitting together, swarming, mobbing, pairing, etc.?
- development techniques that yield multiple forms of value for a single effort, such as test-driven development and test automation, both for infrastructure and for applications?
- general automation to reduce errors and ensure consistency, such as continuous integration, static code analysis, dynamic infrastructure management, etc.?
…and, of course…
- observability rather than monitoring?
Do people actually prefer
Perception
A post on this blog received a very interesting comment from a reader with the nom de pixel Malapine:
"…my problem isn’t boredom but fear: the codebase sucks, we have no idea whether the features are what customers want, and if the product doesn’t sell, some of us may get laid off. If that’s ever me, I am screwed: my resume will show two decades with the same employer, the vast majority of it on Waterfall or ScrumBut projects."
"Off the job, I read books on Agile, go to monthly dojos, etc.; but on the job I can’t even do TDD properly — builds take 20 minutes just to compile, and nobody else seems to care."
I felt this called for more than a response in the comment thread. It seems to me it illustrates that perception can be more important than reality, and that is of interest to me presently.