Comments on: Destroying Teams One Broken Window At A Time

By: ThoughtStream.Create(me);

ThoughtStream.Create(me); — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 18:39:11 +0000

Re: Quality and code coverage…

…

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 23:02:14 +0000

I’ve been involved in exactly this situation, where there was a few of us that were putting in a big effort to encourage unit testing and continuous integration – but this was an uphill battle in an environment where people just didn’t care when the build broke – it would inevitably be left to fix for those who did care, which in the end destroyed the team culture.

By: Max Pool

Max Pool — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:43:00 +0000

@Justin –

You are correct, different environments yield different levels of discipline and thus what is perceived as a “broken window”.

I won’t be dogmatic and tell everyone what I think they should consider broken windows, but here is my team’s list (in order of severity):

1) Checking in code w/o working unit tests
2) Broken build
3) Counting features complete when they are only partially done

For us, these are items that when they occur immediately get corrected so we don’t fall down a slippery slope.

By: Justin Deltener

Justin Deltener — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:35:56 +0000

This post is pretty vague. What’s a broken window vs a cracked or slightly smeared? Ok lets imaging my broken is = to your broken..Does this mean my team is playing with fire to leave this broken feature broken for months? I say neigh! Value, Return On Investment, Resources, Risk..These all play critical parts in deciding how a project is managed and how our precious developmental resources are allocated. All to often I run into coders who have no sense of the COST their development incurs. Not just their precious paychecks, but most importantly the risk/cost associated with pushing critical features further off into the future. I know all to well there are tons of stupid developers out there..but seriously..are you suggesting “project vandalism” is an epidemic? If a member of a team keeps making poor decisions or develops poorly..then they need to be replaced and not allowed to poison the rest of the project. So in all Broken Windows != The end of the world as we know it.

By: Dew Drop - August 11, 2008 | Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew

Dew Drop - August 11, 2008 | Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:30:18 +0000

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