If you’re like many of the teams I meet, you’ve sort of got a handle on things. You can release. Your product mostly works. And, then Something Happens. And, your team has trouble recovering. That’s brittleness in the system. You can build resilience as a team. In this post, I’ll summarize how your team can […]
This series is about helping a team create a less brittle environment—more resilience. Part 1 was about individual work. This part is about shortening feedback loops. Brief description of the problem at a recent client: Person A checked in code that broke an “unrelated” part of the system. I’ll call this checking in code in
Feature-itis. It’s an agile Product Owner game. It’s when the Product Owner says, in his or her best George Carlin voice, “Gimme Features. I don’t care about no stinkin’ framework. I don’t care about no technical debt. I don’t care that it’s going to make your work harder later. I only care about now. I’m
Not every product has smoke tests (a series of tests you can run after each build to make sure the product works well enough to continue development and testing). Smoke tests provide early feedback to developers about their work. So, for the last several years, I’ve been suggesting to my clients that as they