ProgressĪccording to The Progress Principle, a strong key to people remaining happy, engaged, motivated, and creative is making regular progress on meaningful work. In developing software, there is a lot more to gain but it is still ultimately about reducing risk and making tasks easier. My example of eating small bites was simplistic. Many people on Agile teams exposed to concepts like Story decomposition don’t often realize how often they need to apply similar practices in so many other ways. I don’t think most teams recognize this and certainly don’t develop the skill. This need is so pervasive, I propose it be viewed as a fundamental skill in software. The more variation we see, the more we struggle with staying consistent and predictable.īecause of this variation, we need to be good at breaking things down to more manageable sizes. We strive to understand, simplify, prioritize and execute on different types of things that are difficult to digest. It is present from the moment someone has an idea to the moment software is deployed. It’s everywhere, from the size of user stories to tasks to code changes to releases. Variation in Softwareĭelivering software products is a constant struggle with a variation of size and complexity. Other times we fail to break things down due to unknowns, ignorance, uncertainty, pride, optimism, or even laziness. We don’t always see the risks that hide in more complex items and thus don’t feel compelled to break them down. Often we try to tackle things that are too big to sufficiently understand, estimate, or complete in a reasonable amount of time and we suffer for it. But have we translated that lesson to other things in our lives? In some cases, taking smaller bites made the difference in finishing more of the meal. We didn’t always understand the risk of choking that they saw, but ultimately it was easier and safer to chew those smaller bites. As children, we were told by adults to take smaller bites when eating.
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