A slight diversion from our ongoing discussion about technical debt.
I came across a great tweet from Tim Ottinger:
“This work is waiting, and it’s going too slow through the system.”
“I’m not waiting on anything. I am busy all the time.”
“No, but the work waits.”
“NO, I just put it in the queue and someone else gets it later. We’re not waiting.”
Watch the baton, not the runners.
Development shops often structure the flow of work such that everyone is incentivized to just get tickets out of their work queue and handed off to someone downstream. That is considered done.
“I can’t work on this thing anymore because it’s in review.”
This is how you end up with lots of people finishing cards but nothing shipping.
The antidote? Adopt this cultural value: until work is in customer hands, it’s still in process.
