Re:Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion
by brtkdotse on Sunday July 25, 2021 @04:52AM
(#27947760)
I can find a ton of devs paying lip service disagreeing, but the second they utter “we need to rewrite this in…” the facade falls apart.
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Management in turn doesn't pay any attention whatsoever to the technology. They have no idea how quality and productivity is influenced by outdated or poor choices or simply a lack of investment into maintenance.
You need people that care about the how you do it as much about the why and the what. Everything else is going to be disfunctional rather soon.
It’s part of your job to explain that to them. And you have to do it in business terms, that is, how it will impact budget and schedule for the project. And prepare for questions like “ok, you have convinced me that Kotlin is superior to Java, but you are the only one in the team with any Kotlin experience, and we have a rather hard deadline for this project in 9 months. Are you hundred percent sure that we will both manage to train the team and deliver in that timeframe? And you know Karl, who’s retiring in a few years, he doesn’t seem to be very eager to learn something new. And he’s a damn productive Java programmer.”
I would argue that technology is in general not management's responsibility, but resource allocation is.
If you care about quality and productivity, please quantify those and present your findings in terms of tradeoffs.
When I hear “we need to rewrite this in…”, it's usually because someone isn't familiar with the language it's currently in and wants to switch to the old language/framework they like best. I don't think I've ever actually heard someone trying to advocate for shiny new x just because.