Quality And Productivity
This blog post is a placeholder index for a whole series of posts which I wish to do in future on quality and productivity, especially in the context of software development. I will update it to link to each future installment as I make it.
Over the past ten years I have been working as part of a team of developers who work on a single software system.Ten years is not exceptionally long, but I do suspect that it is much longer than the average time most programmers remain involved on a project.
In that time, I’ve gained some experience that I feel has given me a different perspective about many of the decisions and trade-offs we make day to day- because I’ve seen the long-term effect of many such decisions.
In short: I vociferously agree with the Agile and Lean dictum that to increase productivity, one needs to increase quality. Or, the converse: that cutting corners and lowering standards in order to get work done faster is a surefire recipe for decreasing productivity – bogging it down..
Nothing new there; nothing that W. Edwards Deming, the Lean movement, Kent Beck, the signatories of the Agile Manifesto, and may practitioners in my own and other industries haven’t been saying in their own way for the past few decades.
But I find that I’ve grown to think about these things in ways that make it difficult to communicate with people who don’t share the same mental framework. More importantly: I find myself curious about what exactly my own mental framework is: I write it down for my own discovery more than anything else. In my mind, it feels like what I will write in future will be something akin to deriving a lot of the values and rules of thumb of the Agile world “from first principles”, as’t were, because it all “clicks together” in my head in a way I wish to share.
The outline as I anticipate it so far:
- Part 1. Dishwashing, investing, and hemorrhaging.
- Part 2. Selling your soul to get the dishes done.
- The fallacy of “task-centric” thinking.
- Ticking off a to do list, or making repeating appointments?
- Cognitive bias: project mistakes we’re hard-wired to make
- Over time, most systems tend to become absolutely dominated by long-term negative effects of short-term decisions.