Most people who do coaching work in the IT space focus on one of three areas: (a) technical practices, (b) process improvement, and (c) organizational dynamics or “human factors.” It’s not unusual for a person to have skills in both process improvement and organizational dynamics. It is rare for the same person to work at both the level of technical practices and the level of process improvement, and even more rare for that person to be engaged for both purposes at the same time.
I’ve observed a sort of disconnection between process improvement initiatives at the organizational level and improvements in technical practices at the team level. I don’t know if the reason for this is, in part, the separation, first in formal education in universities and technical schools, and later in coaching, consulting, and training services, between technical practices on the one hand and process improvement and organizational dynamics on the other. Whatever the cause or causes, the situation appears to be that improvements in technical practices and improvements in process are treated as separate and disconnected issues.
I think the two are connected. Technical debt is more than merely an annoyance for maintenance programmers who have to deal with a challenging code base. A mass of tightly-coupled code can make it very difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to implement general improvements.
Continue reading The domino effect of technical debt