Dragan Stepanović

Same scene in Berlin U-Bahn (metro) this morning.

In systems with very short feedback loops there are almost no events. Everything seems to be boring. The longer the feedback loop, the more pressure builds up with time elapsed, the greater the sense of relief and achievement this produces on emotional level when the feedback loop is closed (marking an event that has just happened in the system). Ironically enough, watching for moments of relief and achievement says a lot about existence of events that are too big, which in turn reflects the existence of too long feedback loops.

Committing code very often and deploying to production with every commit is enabling constraint for getting better at incremental development, one of the most overlooked skills in software development.

Three very powerful questions to keep in mind when discussing a solution:

Let me unwrap that.

Actually, problem with silos is that by removing broader context in which they operate, people tend to locally optimize, which almost never produces overall outcomes that we initially wanted to achieve.

Instead of asking: “When is all this going to be done?”, why don’t we ask: “Why can’t we release what we have now?”.

I tend to think that there’s a correlation between the number of hand-offs and the need to visualize current work. The more hand-offs we have, the more there’s a need to answer the question: “where or with whom is this thing currently sitting with?”.

“Tell me how you measure me, and I will tell you how I will behave” – Eliyahu M. Goldratt

In case you’re doing Trunk Based Development (and you should be doing it) you already know or have heard that Feature Flags are a form of technical debt. In fact, some teams have so many difficulties with this introduced technical debt that they “lose trust” in Trunk Based Development and fallback to Feature Branching. The important thing here to realize is that this is actually a decisive point in the development.