Red Green Repeat Adventures of a Spec Driven Junkie

Problem Creep: Continuing Current Solution

Previously, I wrote about solution alignment when solving the local development on-boarding is a problem.

It is fine if you choose to let whatever solution you have in place to continue. A certain type of team culture builds around that.

Namely, developers need to be tough enough to get things going on their own.

This can be a good and bad thing.

  • Good to encourage self reliant team members.
  • Bad when a team member’s enviroment is not working and there’s a deadline.

When things are bad, it pours.

In my case, the current solution carried on for a long time and could continue to carry on. The team self-assembled around adapting to it. Documenting steps for everyone to reference. When a new team member joins, the next newest team member would help them out.

Absolutely nothing wrong with this approach.

For me, what became an issue is over time, base components of the development environment upgraded yet, the application used the old one.

When new team members joined, they would be using new versions of the components than production, or even other team members.

That creates interesting code changes that are a whole new class of problems.

Continuing on with current solution can encourage certain culture to build. Just make sure there are no other unintended side effects.

Next, I will talk about stopping the team and fixing the problem here