NFJS - Business Pressure

October 2017

Business pressure on the technology team is a constant. There is a struggle between delivering maintainable, performant, and tested code vs fast deliverables. At No Fluss, Janelle Klein hit on a pattern that we as developers. Start a clean foundation, have a few good deliveries. Then the "exception" to hitting a high pressure deadline happens. You take on technical debt. One of the main points that Klein hit on was that in business, paying the interest on debt can be easily offset. What business doesn't like its risk.

How much risk? Well if you can't measure it, you don't know. Open mastery is a tool that developers can use to track how much time they are working on addressing issues. There are issues with tools. Some companies do not allow their employees to install software. I struggle to log my time on my tickets properly. There is one habit I did adapt, which is to add my JIRA ticket to my commits.

My goal is to ask the team to add their time to their commits too. Since we have the Atlassian Suite, we could eventually enable "smart commits". In a smart you can add a hash #time and include the time you worked on that ticket. https://confluence.atlassian.com/fisheye/using-smart-commits-298976812.html

If I cannot get smart commits enabled, then at least I could use git-log to look for the same pattern for each developer. :)