The final day of Agile + DevOps East 2018 dawned to
something a little different. The Agile Leadership Summit was expressly
designed to have a different feel than the main conference, with a pair of presentations
in the morning followed up by brainstorming some ideas and solutions to issues
that those of us in the Thursday night networking session had identified.
I had my doubts about my participation in this day. I’m not
in a position at my company where I’m anything but an individual contributor,
and for the most part that’s exactly what I’m comfortable with. No more, no
less. What was I doing at a leadership summit anyway?
Anne Hungate’s presentation called Lead Yourself First erased
my doubts straight away. This may have been one of the most important talks of
the whole conference for me personally. One critical point: my company sent two
people to this conference. That’s well less than 1% of our total workforce. We
may be primarily IC’s in our jobs, but other members of our teams are now
looking to us to show that we learned something over this week. The lessons
that we’ve acquired shouldn’t just apply to us, we should be evangelizing them
throughout our teams and finding ways to make everyone better because we attended
this conference.
For the afternoon, I joined a group looking for solutions to
Technical Debt. In talking to my fellow test engineers over the course of the
week, one of the things that really stood out was practically all of us were
struggling with technical debt and finding time to build the automation that
our companies needed. By far the dominant solution among my fellow TEs was that
we ignore it, get pulled into manual testing and dev tasks, and buy rounds of
drinks while commiserating with our peers. Since most of us don’t actually want
to spend the rest of our careers as high-functioning alcoholics, any ideas for fixing
this problem are a good thing.
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| "Oh, you think you've got tech debt? Let me tell you a story..." "You win bro. I've got this round. Dilly dilly." Image via Holly's Cheat Day |
We ended up with a very interesting, diverse group of
individuals from the UK, Netherlands, and the US, representing the defense,
banking, consulting, and insurance industries. Andrea Goulet joined our table to
contribute her thoughts as well.
Did we solve the technical debt problem? Of course not. This
isn’t something that going to be solved for all companies in a single afternoon
at a technical conference. We did, however, come up with a few creative ideas
that may help us push some solutions forward within our respective companies.
One of the biggest points that we made over and over was that technical debt
needs to be treated like a real-world maintenance problem: for example, you can
ignore changing the oil in your car, but eventually that small, ignored bit of
maintenance is going to lead to a big, expensive breakdown.
I ended the day with a visit to Disney Springs for a bit of
shopping. Can’t go home to The Terror Team empty handed. After three years of
cold, snowy winters, hearing Christmas music and seeing Christmas decorations
while walking around a gigantic open-air mall wearing shorts and a t-shirt was fairly
jarring. Eating a meal outside was nice, but I won’t feel like Christmas is
actually a month and or so away until I’m back home glaring at the snow on my lawn.
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