Dragan Stepanović

Some of the things I think about when asked how to influence change in teams/orgs as a Principal/Staff engineer:

• Invest time in building relationships before (big) course-correcting. In the start: a productive relationship is more important than being right. Spend time working together with people and sharing the constraints they are facing day-to-day, it will help you understand their context which makes your future interventions more likely to be useful.

than working on an isolated, long-lived feature branch, with a delayed review, integration feedback, and a lack of tests.

If you halve the change size, your deployment frequency goes up twice, and now in order to keep the same change failure rate % as before you have to have twice as many failures per change.

Automated tests as a safety net are most valuable in codebases with high risk when making a change. Those are conflated, coupled codebases where: 1) the average rate of change per element (method/class) is high and 2) the risk of introducing problems with a change is high (too much coupling). The latter is a consequence of the former, and codebases with long methods and classes inherently exhibit these characteristics.

by intentionally not adding integration tests.

the idea of a person with the highest positional power usually wins.

A: “Teams doing XP produce tremendously fewer bugs and have way less rework compared to traditional teams you mostly see in our industry” B: “That’s great, but at what cost?”

“pair/mob programming cannot substitute PR code review process. We still need a fresh pair of eyes to look at the changes” I’d have a million € now.

If, say, product managers are not able to understand those tests, then I’d say they don’t speak domain enough.

and exponentially increasing the risk of something going wrong as you add more functionality is pretty extreme programming compared to TDD if you ask me.