3 ms·
> continuous refactoring/improvement is a vital pillar of agile. The problem with this pillar is it's often viewed as nothing more than waste by business. Try
by cogman10 3y ago
> continuous refactoring/improvement is a vital pillar of agile.
The problem with this pillar is it's often viewed as nothing more than waste by business. Try arguing with a PM "Hey, we need to actually take a bit of time to redo XYZ because it's really janky" and they'll come back with "Yes, but client PDQ is ready to give us money for this shiny new feature! We don't have time to waste redoing XYZ because it's not currently causing us any problems".
The table going from 1, 2, 10, 20, 50 columns never actually hurt the system. It got nasty looking but ultimately not something you could sell to a manager "Hey, we should address this". So, by the time "Hey, let's expose this" rolled around the institutional will to want to correct anything had long since past.
It's really easy to sell redoing something if it's actively causing harm to the systems, but stuff that's just a bit janky has next to 0 priority (often even negative priority because fixing it might break something).
- lmm 3y agoThere's a balance to be had - and frankly most code has a finite lifetime and developers often put too much priority on making it cleaner than it needs to be. The technical debt metaphor is a good one; a PM should understand that when code isn't clean it increases the cost of making changes to that code, and sometimes that's a price you want to pay and sometimes you don't.