I use many apps on my Mac, iPad, and iPhone. There is clearly something in the air because, during the past three weeks, most of them broke. Here's a partial list:
- The password manager (on all three devices, with at least 4 failure modes)
- Two different health-based apps
- Various kinds of email-based apps
What do each of these failures have in common?
“Agile.” Each company has said they use an agile approach. They think “agile” means they can move fast and break things. (That's a prime example of fake agility.)
People. My dear people. I have only one response to that:
NO. The point of agility was to move fast and FIX things!!!
The faster our feedback loops (cycle time), the faster we learn what we do and do not finish. If we have one-day stories (feedback loops), we don't need bug-tracking systems. Teams can find and fix the problem right away. Even better, no one needs to store defects anywhere, because the team FIXED THEM.
As a positive side effect, no one needs “triage” meetings because there is no backlog of defects.
Look, I get it—effective product development is very difficult to do right. We don't understand all the requirements, or we don't realize that if we touch something here, it affects something over there. Worse, we might not have a full cross-functional team, and we don't know what we don't know.
Agility is not about speed. Instead, agility is about our ability to change direction because we FINISHED THE WORK.
That includes all those defects that the testers (hopefully) found and that the developers can then fix.
Please. Please. For my mental health (and your customers' health too), stop breaking things fast.
Please fix them instead. And fast, please. Thank you.
OMG. This. So much this. I hate being at the mercy of tech people who are anxious to get out the next new thing as fast as possible.
Yeah. So it’s not just me, is it? Sigh.