> 'If we don't do it now, development efforts (and therefore also costs) will be up 15% in 4 months.' Yeah you won't get to a point where you'll have a valid-e

> 'If we don't do it now, development efforts (and therefore also costs) will be up 15% in 4 months.' Yeah you won't get to a point where you'll have a valid-enough metric to make this point. I was at a startup once. The two founders said "don't write unit tests". I wasn't going to argue with them. I understood what they really meant. We've been too slow, we need to ship as fast as possible. I shipped fast and I shipped quality (ie low defects and outages). I wrote unit tests. They didn't need to know. They just needed the outcome. The elephant in the room in all of these conversations is that you walk into any software development shop and they just don't how to ship both fast and at quality. No matter how much an organization or team tries to revisit/refactor their dev process year-to-year, they're still shipping too slow and mediocre quality. The truth is there isn't a magic formula. It's an individual craft that gets you there. It's a team sport. And the context is different enough everywhere you go, yeah, sure, some lightweight processes might abstract across the universe but very little bang for those bucks. Far beyond any other facet of things, you really just have to have a good team with experience and the right value-system/value-delivery-focused wisdom.