Software death spiral:
“We don’t have automated tests, so we need many environments with slow, manual checks in each.” 😬
Virtuous cycle:
“We have comprehensive tests, so we deploy straight to prod automatically when the CI build passes. We deploy multiple times a day.”🔥
I’ve found that people get hooked on endlessly intellectualizing their emotional patterns as a way to avoid doing anything about them. The problem is that intellectual understanding can give a sense of progress & change without progress or change actually occurring.
Something that old boring process literature talk about (Toyota, The Goal etc) that applies to software engineering 10000000% is that minimizing the size of the feedback loop is much more important for productivity than minimizing idleness