Tidy First? in One Page

From the coming executive briefing

When geeks run off to start tidying, resistance from various angles quickly appears. Product managers, engineering managers, even colleagues push back. Stop wasting time on this design crap & get back to churning out features.

As with Extreme Programming, any change that’s going to stick needs a partnership between implementors & executives. With that pair singing from the same page, customers & the management between eventually harmonize. Without an executive/geek partnership, attempts to change splutter out or go underground.

Starting next week & weekly for 8 weeks, paying subscribers will be seeing chapters of The Surprise Factory, a 20-page executive briefing on Tidy First? The titular factory is software development that frequently delivers happy surprises to customers, product, management, & investors. Software design is the missing skill/activity standing in the way of creating a Surprise Factory, & executive support is the key organizational ingredient.

Here is the one-page briefing-on-a-briefing (on a book that’s the first of a series—I have a lot of work to do!)

Briefing on the Briefing

This book will help you, an executive in a software-based business, create a Surprise Factory, a team frequently delivering pleasant surprises. Sound unlikely? I hope you’ll stick with me. The missing ingredient is software design (aka "paying down technical debt" aka "refactoring"), but in the right proportions at the right times.

If you only have a minute to read, here are the classic software design blunders:

• Thou shalt not rewrite the whole system.

• Thou shalt not pause delivery of features for an extended period to fix the design.

• Thou shalt not delay the first feature to "get the design right".

• Thou shalt not thoughtlessly demand the next feature immediately upon completion of the last.

Why not, & what to do instead, are the topic of this briefing.

Mixing software design into development isn’t one of those monochrome problems. Your team needs your judgement, perspective, & vision to balance today’s needs & tomorrow’s opportunities.

For more detail, see Tidy First?: A Daily Exercise in Empirical Software Design or contact the author at kentlbeck@gmail.com.