Dragan Stepanović

that “pressure from product and business made us produce this mess in the code” I need to see how tight your feedback loops are.

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.