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.