Incentives are a funny thing. Done well, they can spur your team to productivity and career-advancing, win-win situations. Done not so well, they can create havoc. As this point, I could offer up a dry explanation of the “law of unintended consequences,” but I’ll let Wikipedia do that. Instead, I’ll tell you a quick story…
Last time, I talked through a little bit of housekeeping on the way to creating a metric that would be, uniquely, ours. Nevermind the fact that, under the hood, the metric is still lines of code. It now has a promising name and is expressed in the units we want. And, I think that’s okay….
For many years, I associated the concept of “making the complex simple” with teaching. And that’s certainly not wrong. We’re in an industry filled with complexity, both essential and accidental. To survive in this industry requires understanding essential complexity and eliminating accidental complexity, and novices struggle with this. As developers become self-sufficient, they figure out…
There’s a conventional wisdom that says software developers can’t test their own code. I think it’s really more intended to say that you can’t meaningfully test the behavior of software that you’ve written to behave a certain way. The reasoning is simple enough. If you write code with the happy path in mind, you’ll always…
Managing Blind Let me see if I can get in your head a little bit. You manage a team of developers and it goes well at times. But, at other times, not so much. Deadlines slide past without a deliverable, weird things happen in production and you sometimes get deja vu when a bug comes…
