As an engineering leader, I’ve seen the following pattern play out multiple times, across multiple companies Executives complain about engineering velocity not being high enough. “I just want to show the user’s birthday on the settings page. Why does that take a whole year?” Engineers respond that tech debt is holding them back Executives tell … Continue reading Tech debt can’t be solved as a roadmap item. It needs to be part of your daily routine
Tag: velocity
Moneyball for Software Teams – An Imperfect Heuristic for Quantifying Dev Performance
Someone on Reddit once asked for “unethical career advice” for software developers. Here’s the most highly rated answer with over two thousand people liking it: Make a good first impression and you're set for a while. Something takes longer? They're a good developer so I guess we under pointed that. It is actually insane to … Continue reading Moneyball for Software Teams – An Imperfect Heuristic for Quantifying Dev Performance
The Birth of Legacy Software – How Change Aversion Feeds On Itself
Here's a common pattern that I see play out very often in software teams: There is a need to change the existing system behavior to accomplish new functionality. The software engineer looking at the task realizes that the existing design isn't well suited to the change needed. They suggest design changes and refactoring, as part … Continue reading The Birth of Legacy Software – How Change Aversion Feeds On Itself
Software the Hard way 