Obsessed with Quality (…w/ a special bonus: On User Stories)
Guest contributor: Scrum Master Dan-o I’m working with a team now where code commits literally take years to get to production. Why such a long delay? Months and months of repetitive testing and security checks by numerous teams, departments, outside organizations, ad nauseam - essentially years’ worth of bureaucratic red tape. I’m not of the opinion that bureaucracy is inherently evil but I do think it is a misguided attempt to solve a legitimate problem. In actuality, I think it winds up being a self-fulfilling prophecy guaranteed to justify its own existence. Typically, what I’ve seen happen is you have a team deploy say, 100 features to production and one of them has a defect. Rather than do a root cause analysis, management wants assurance that no defect ever makes it to production again so they force EVERY feature to go through an intense series of gates. Developers then, knowing that the robust system of checks will catch any defect (and often getting pressured by manageme...