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The Last 1%

jaredramsey.com

91–93 of 93 posts

Re: The Last 1%

#91
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

intuitively i agree with you, i've seen a lot of the pseudo-science. But curious, can you elaborate on how telemetry driven development leads to organizational turf wars? I think i've seen that too but interested to hear your thoughts.

Everything from what gets tracked to how the data gets interpreted. It also can put a target on certain growth areas that will attract the more "ambitious" people from the company. All will try to make the case with the telemetry data. Does more time on a page mean users are more engaged or are they struggling to find out what's going on? Depends on which product manager can make a better case, probably involving eve…

> In the creative IC model, the designer and developer work to solve a problem based on their experience building product.

This is great for helping to build products, not companies. Companies are larger than just their products; they also have obligations to existing customers, stakeholders represented by auditors, etc. That's not an argument that new products should be anchored down by these other concerns; it's an argument that "creative IC" should only be launched with clear alpha/beta/preview-style labeling, and that there should also be engineers who are not paired with Product, whose job it is to "fill in the rest", so to speak, because it's also important.

Re: The Last 1%

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fond it works to have a division of labour between builders and maintainers. Just like in property management, the different phases need a different approach.

If builders don't experience the maintenance costs of their decisions, how will they ever learn? And even if they do learn, where's their incentive to do it better next time?

You limit builders by forcing anything they build to hold an alpha/beta/preview label, where it doesn't graduate to having the full backing of the company if maintainers can't fill in the rest of what's necessary for long-term maintenance. The incentives revolve around how many "builder" projects eventually end up losing the alpha/beta/preview label and how long it took to lose the label.

Re: The Last 1%

#93
post #63

I don’t think it’s very likely that a developer will ever implement automated testing.

I'm a developer and I require automated testing even on my personal projects. Every change I make, I _know_ it will not fundamentally break for my users. I never manually run through to check things before release, tests cover it. (Yes bugs happen; that is different than releasing code that can't talk to the database because you can't be bothered to check that the app works at all) If you are not pushing for automate…

Seconded.

Recently while refactoring I realized I was breaking nearly everything. Most code didn't have tests -- I'm working on an experiment.

So, I coded 3-4 tests of the "run the main program and if it doesn't crash then it passes" style. These tests are silly, but they catch lots of refactoring bugs! And it only took 30 seconds to write the test.

If later I decide the actual _values_ matter, I can add another test, but this "break glass" test is already giving me benefits. I can refactor bravely and see how much stuff goes up in flames. Very useful!

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