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    Properties of a trusted development process

    • Tuesday, Mar 24, 2020
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    [Reading time: 1 minute 17 seconds]

    Trusted processes are needed to build great products.

    But what does it mean for a process to be trusted?

    It needs to have several qualities:

    • It needs to be predictable
    • It needs to be measurable
    • It needs to be adaptable
    • It needs to be resilient: able to accommodate surprises
    • For a process to be trusted, all its components have to be trusted

    This all sounds pretty obvious and straight-forward – until you try to map out what it actually means.

    What does it mean for a development process (or elements of it) to be predictable, for instance?

    Is Scrum predictable?

    Is Jenkins predictable?

    …and if they are, how does that influence whether we trust our work, the work of others, or the work of machines?

    It’s funny how we rarely have an actual solid definition of trust, yet we have a pretty good gut feel about it.

    I suppose entire books have been written about this; but who has time to read them?

    And what’s the point? Because you’ll need to find your own answers to these things – books will give you hints, show you promising approaches.

    But it’ll be up to you to turn them from a mindless bag of tricks to something awesome.

    Because, and this is both blindingly obvious and frequently overlooked: people are integral parts of that process.

    Let’s dig into this over the next few days.