But does it help you ship?

Thorsten Ball · 25 Aug 2020 · thorstenball.com ↗

2 korrents from this piece

Thorsten Ball did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Automated tooling that works nearly all the time still imposes an ongoing maintenance cost, because it breaks unpredictably at the edges.

Their wordsAnother thing that needs to be fixed when it ultimately breaks down, another bit of automation that works 99% of the time, but starts making funny noises when you slip into the 1%
Our reading
Building automation that doesn't address the actual bottleneck to shipping adds noise rather than helping ship.

Their wordsIf what's holding you back from shipping is, say, getting more customer input, or a brittle release process, or flaky monitoring, or missing tests, then all the bot does is to add noise. It doesn't help you ship.