On: A developer goes to a DevOps conference

[Guthur]

I'm not convinced that it's only POs that struggle with quantifying the cost of a bug in production.

I can see the same when programming language advocates extol the benefits of more static analysis for software that does not even remotely need the level of reliability they are aiming for.

The guy who hacks it together in PHP will just get to market first and get such a critical mass of market share that 5-10% more reliability probably won't matter.

Of course a lot of this depends on market sector, self driving cars are a million miles from serving banner ads.

[mr_tristan → Guthur]

True, many POs/PMs drive a lot of prioritization of work, since (maybe unfortunately), they're usually the ones left to "understanding the business impact".

It kind of adds more credence to people not being so siloed in responsibility. We all just bring different skills to the party. Thus, we're all responsible for quality, for business impact and prioritization, etc.

Unfortunately, I've often had situations where, upon a reorganization, I'm left with managers who love to "guard others from distractions" and end up cutting team members off from broader discussions. Thus, leading to the siloing.

This is why I think "DevOps" ends up meaning nothing. It's a _lot_ of details that requires lots of communication and knowledge sharing that can be overwhelming to, ahem, certain PHB types. Sometimes you can implement a tool, other times you can just not build a particular feature, but the reasons are usually very complex and never easily get broken into a simple one-liner task definition with a story point cost.