Chapter 17 Whip the Ponies Harder

The Nature of Software Development — by Ron Jeffries (39 / 49)

👈 Chapter 16 Managing Natural Software Development | TOC | Chapter 18 To Speed Up, Build with Skill 👉

A high-level manager was told that a project was moving more slowly than had been hoped. He retorted, “Well, we’ll just have to whip the ponies harder.”

I find it difficult to think of a management comment more repugnant than that. In addition, it was sure to backfire.

Under pressure, teams give up the wrong things. They don’t test enough; they leave the code in poor condition. This reduces value, increases the delay to getting the value, and reduces the value they can deliver later.

Under pressure, teams test less and therefore put more defects in. Some of these defects escape the room and affect customers. Value is directly reduced.

Some defects are discovered before the product ships. This usually means that we have a testing phase that comes after we think we are “done.” Already this is delaying delivery of value.

Worse yet, we have to take time to fix the problems. This rework delays and reduces value even more.

Finally, when our teams work under pressure, they leave the code in bad condition. This makes adding new features harder and slows down value delivery even more.

How many defects do you have now? Do you really want more? How often do developers say that the condition of the code slows them down? Did your innocent pressure cause those things?

We need more features! Why can’t we just increase velocity?

Frankly, when I look into an organization that “needs more features,” what I almost invariably find is an organization that can’t say no. They have become order takers rather than decision makers. They’re working on some things of value, perhaps, but much of the work they’re doing doesn’t bring much real value to their products — or to their customers.

No, really we need more features! The programmers have to go faster!

Your programmers are going as fast as they reasonably can. There may be ways that the code can be improved over time so that they can go faster. There are almost certainly ways to reduce defect injection, which saves you all that fixing time. Those are improvements that take time to make, and they…

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