Overview of this 2 hour episode
Hey this is Denis—Adrian unfortunately couldn’t make it to the show. The episode was for the most part driven by live question from the audience.
[TL;DR]
As a stakeholder you will be tempted to act boldly when approaching the limits of your business constraints. Bold moves can impede on the engineering departments ability to manage their own work and create a trust issue. Lack of trust further escalates harmful micro-optimisations like:
Testing shortcuts (none, later, no TDD)
More meetings (control and management lead to lower engagement)
More process (PR controls, gatekeeping, Change advisory boards)
Key insights
💡 The need for a meaningful conversation with the business to explain that investing in TDD does not take away from feature building, but rather reallocates resources from manual testing and support.
🚧 Not practicing TDD is like taking the safety off on every technical decision, leading to risky and potentially harmful software development.
🤝 Business people and engineering teams need to see themselves as peers and collaborate in a complex system, making decisions based on their respective expertise.
💡 Implementing TDD requires removing old processes and rituals to make room for the new approach, creating a vacuum for better solutions to gain traction.
🚂 The train stops so that everybody on the team can go help and fix the problem, that's the whole point with continuous integration.
🚦 TDD allows for immediate feedback on the status of a feature, preventing costly delays in the development process.
💰 "The business gets a number of benefits from TDD: reduce bugs, much better ability to fund work incrementally, exactly that's what Kent Beck calls optionality."
🚀 Trying out TDD in a high-risk environment is the best way to truly learn and understand its benefits.
Hey, this is Denis once more. Hope you enjoy, let me know what your favorite bit was.
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