Chapter 18. Effective Engineering Productivity

Often, people who work on engineering productivity either come into conflict with the developers they are attempting to help, or spend a long time working on some project that ends up not mattering because nobody actually cares about it.

This comes about because the problem that you see that a development team has is not necessarily the problem that they know exists. For example, you could come into the team and see that they have hopelessly complex code and so they can't write good tests or maintain the system easily. However, the developers aren't really aware that they have complex code or that this complexity is causing the trouble that they are having. What they are aware of is something like, "we can only release once a month and the whole team has to stay at work until 10:00 PM to get the release out on the day that we release."

When engineering productivity workers encounter this situation, some of them just...