Don't do Health Sprints - Working from Home journey(Day 20/21)

Another week and interesting things are happening. Changing the structure.

Work

In my previous posts I shared a lot about how to think about slicing, having smaller PRs or commit messages. The last days I think I somehow escalated this up to my Lead and our Head of (see below)

How? I shared my concerns that this big feature and all the duplicate code is happening.

Additionally, I discovered myself a dysfunctional pattern when dealing with PR comments.

I'm also trying to help our Apps Team move to a WebView based Native App due to some re-org and the team moving to the Fashion Store. This can be very interesting as we are slowly iterating towards PWA's (Progressive Web Apps) and having a Native App with Web Views will provide us an interesting test-case for the future 😅

TIL

As this week was all about big pull-requests and anti-patterns, here comes another one:

• You should constantly refactor your code. Always plan for a small improvement.

Yes, it is basically the Boy Scout Rule:

Leave the campground cleaner than you found it.

Whenever you touch a code and you realize something is hard to understand, a variable is named unclear or an import is unused, change it! Fix it! Improve!

I think one of the big anti-pattern in Agile + Scrum is that once we start thinking in sprints, developers can end up rushing from sprint goal to sprint goal and forget about their code, architecture.

The end result is: "Health Sprints" or "Tech Debt Sprints".

The major issue a "Tech Debt Sprint" provides is that it will give you, as a developer, a wrong safety. The moment you have a Review near, Product Managers asking frequently "When can we show the new feature?" as developers we will tend to skip maybe some needed refactoring, bad design choice we made.

Additionally, such "Health Sprints" only tackle added Tech Debt. What happens to existing problems? What if you own now a new application developed for years by others?

All in all, I realize more and more that having a really good tooling in our frontend applications (linters, formatters, testing) and agreeing on best practices is important. They help reduce certain tech debt. And Architecture needs to evolve anyway.

General

I'm quiet exhausted, I guess due to 4 weeks being in remote work and slowly my body needs to rest. Rest from all the Covid-19 anxiety, stress.
Rest from trying to work with all the noise and difficulties.

Eastern I will do nothing. Try not to open even a laptop.

Cheers,

Ferit