Comment by sirsinsalot
3 years ago
I get why bureaucracy is a total pain, getting work approved by stakeholders constantly ...
But the actual ticketing/PR system? Change requires control.
The actual issue is not _using_ that control tool to get the right things done. If basic technical debt issues are not an easy sell in your org, that's the real problem and one that should be handled by senior/dev manager.
A big red flag for me is any org that doesn't recognise and service technical debt and empower engineers to make a win.
I also wouldn't say tech debt pay-off should be without its justification in some cases. If an engineer can't measure the positive impact of doing something, it can make it a hard sell. Why should an engineer spend 2 weeks doing something if we can't describe the payoff?
> But the actual ticketing/PR system? Change requires control.
The ticket system isn't for engineers. If it were for the engineers, they wouldn't be continually forced to use it. The ticket system is for the legibility of management or sometimes compliance (other flavors of management). This visibility is at the expense of the productivity of the engineers themselves.
> Change requires control
No, fundamentally, change is gated by control. The more control, the less the change, with sufficient levels of "control" leading to no change.
Requiring a "non-tech PO" to upgrade a package is just broken, though. PMs are good at some things, but giving them power over every minute of an engineer's day is a recipe for badness.
Agreed. I'm not sure I'd let anyone who wasn't from a hands-on SWE background decide the priority of technical work.
Of course, in some cases, it is right to say "Here's the problem, and what could go wrong if we don't fix it. You need to accept the risk".
It's a sad fact of life that technical problems need to be sold to non-technical people as they're often the ones shouldering the risk.
Part of my day-to-day is selling tech debt pay-off work to clients who have to pay for it. They rightly ask "why should we pay for this?".
I think in 99% of cases (like your package upgrade example) the systemic failure is elsewhere and the approval is often meaningless and inefficient.
> Change requires control.
But code, unit tests, git commit messages and merge requests are already providing 4x documentation of code changes. Adding Jira tickets and production deployment documentation gets you to 6x documentation.
In my experience, if your company's problems weren't solved with 4x documentation, they won't be solved by going to 6x documentation.
I'm not sure that's a like-for-like comparison and if those things overlap like that, it sounds wrong:
- Ticket: Description of the requirement
- Code: How it was done
- Review: Peer-learning, change evolution
- Unit test: Testing of implementation as understood by SWE
- QA: Did the change match the requirement, did the SWE understand it? Is the outcome the right one?
Each "item" should serve a distinct purpose, have distinct value and be justified. If they seem like duplicates, then that probably points at issues elsewhere.
- Ticket: AB-123 Increase the API maximum page size from 500 to 1000
- Code change: MAXIMUM_PAGE_SIZE -500 +1000
- Unit test: assert len(request[0:2000]) == 1000
- Commit message: Increase the API maximum page size from 500 to 1000
- Merge request: Increase the API maximum page size from 500 to 1000. For AB-123
- Daily scrum update: I've increased the API maximum page size from 500 to 1000, if someone could have a look at my merge request.
- Deployment request: Increase the API maximum page size from 500 to 1000, for AB-123
- Post-deployment test plan: AB-123, ensure maximum API page size is now 1000
- Stakeholder demo: When an API request is made, the page size is now 1000.
3 replies →