Crap, That Sounds Hard
In my last blog post I talked about making sure your practices are delivering business value and changing things up if the value isn’t being produced. What I failed to mention was that this process of determining what works and doesn’t work for your context and organization is really difficult.
Fortunately, Marc Evers was paying attention and posted his thoughts on knowing if your practices are working. My first reaction to Marc’s post was, “Crap, that all sounds like it would be a pain and a lot of work.” And then I realized I had that reaction because that’s the truth.
Maybe this isn’t brain surgery and for the large majority of software being developed people’s lives aren’t at risk, but that doesn’t mean developing an organization that excels at software development is easy. There are no easy answers. It requires thought and time and effort. People looking for a quick fix should look elsewhere. You aren’t going to find it here or anywhere else (but you are welcome to keep looking while the rest of us get even better at what we do).