Comment by ziml77
3 years ago
This lines up with my experience. The person making constant "tactical" changes looks super productive. But they just deferred the productivity cost. You end up continuing to deal with their fragile mess for the rest of the lifetime of the product.
I fully understand that there are circumstances where true tactical changes do make sense, but the tradeoffs should be considered up front.
The way to handle this, I believe, is to make sure that the bug reports resulting from the "tornado"'s work end up back in their own lap. Don't let someone else fix them, especially not someone on another team. It has to be done non-antagonistically, of course. But it's the only way to make it clear to both management and (more importantly) the dev themself that there is a tradeoff for speed.