Not that long ago I asked a team member what he was working on. He said, “It’s what our scrum master assigned me.” While I was tempted to dive into how that kind of scrum worked (or didn’t), I wasn’t looking to understand team dynamics. I rephrased my question and asked, “Ok, got it. Why is this feature important right now?”
There’s never enough time to get everything done. It’s loads of fun to just “code stuff up” and get it done, show off a fancy demo, and hear everyone oooh and ahhh. Or, build out a slick CI/CD pipeline that gives each developer their own ephemeral environment, tests the heck out of new code, blocks all the threats, and then shuts itself down all without incurring any noticable cost. That gets plenty of oooh’s and ahhh’s too.
There are a lot of distractions out there, sapping our productivity, keeping us from gettings things done. So how do we defend our team from an influx of distractions?
