Every day you have to balance between these 3 circles to challenge both yourself and your team to reach the star. I know it is hard. Some of you are most comfortable with delivering at time, others with delivering the thing without thinking about potential interaction with the world, … Bad news: every one of you should leave its comfort zone. Good news: the comfort zone of your teammate is not the same as yours and as you will move together you will support each other. The main benefit is not only to improve your skills, it is to grow up. Literally. To grow up as a Software Engineer.

IMHO main trait of software is to be a whole. You certainly notice that you are neither a User Story Engineer, nor a Feature Engineer. You are a Software one. Your work is part of something bigger you must be aware of. Regarding Engineer I see it as a person who solves problems. Like solvers inside a simulation. As well as we can have more than one solvers for a simulation, the way we are approaching and tackling problems can be multiple. But it is kind of binary world: there is problem(s) and solution(s) and you belong to one or another. Said differently, if you are not part of the solution, consider yourself as a part of the problem.

This said I am kindly exhausted to hear that some of you refuse to engage in the daily cleaning phase, still practice quick and dirty stuff, refuse to use recommended tools, do not size with unit test and documentation in mind, and so on…

I remind every one of you that your primary work is to be part of a team. Within a team there are rules, rules you must follow. And I am not only talking about discipline but respect too. Hopefully as a teammate you are a first-class actor of this game. Rules can evolve but they have to jointly.

I want everybody to be especially aware of this during development phase and code review. Otherwise we will end up with a bigger technical debt – hint: current one is a sizable one. And technical debt is ours, even if inherited. If you don’t friendly play you will dig deeper and next developer generation will look at your work the way you currently estimate the work of your predecessors. It is up to you to break the cycle…

There won’t be any revolutionary brand-new architecture, huge refactoring timeslot budget, … which will magically erase the technical debt. Those who said that are liars, those who believe it pretty naive dreamers. The only viable way to deal with debt is to tackle it daily.

I hear some of you asking for huge time slot, dedicated stories, … But between us if you cannot handle this daily work I really doubt you will succeed to achieve revamping a whole topic. You simply lack credibility. Period.

If you do not react you will definitively become frogs…