Arty Starr

Top 5 Reasons Why Improvement Efforts Fail

This is my story of lessons learned on why improvement efforts fail… I had a great team. We were disciplined about best practices and spent tons of time on improvements. Then I watched my team slam into a brick wall. We brought down production three times in a row, then couldn’t ship again for a year.

Despite our best efforts with CI, unit testing, design reviews, and code reviews, we lost our ability to understand the system. We thought our problems were caused by technical debt building up in the code base, but we were wrong. We failed to improve, because we didn’t solve the right problems. Eventually, we turned our project around, but with a lot of tough lessons along the way.

The Art of Better

What does “better” really mean? If we eliminate duplication, is the code better? If we decide to skip the unit tests, are we doing worse? How do we decide if one design is better than another design?

In this talk, I'll introduce the Idea Flow Learning Framework, a data-driven feedback loop for improving your software development skills. By measuring the “friction” that occurs when developers interact with the code, we can identify the biggest causes of friction and systematically optimize developer experience.

With an unambiguous definition of “better” and objective feedback to learn what works, we can learn our way to better despite the vast world of gray.

How to Break the Software Rewrite Cycle

Despite our best efforts with Agile best practices – CI, unit testing, design reviews, code reviews – every few years we end up rewriting our software.

This talk is about my personal experiences with project failure, improvement failure, patterns across the industry, and the key lessons that were critical to success. I had a great team. We were disciplined with best practices and spent tons of time working on improvements. Yet still, I watched my team slam into a brick wall. We brought down production three times in a row, then couldn't ship again for another year.

We thought our problems were caused by technical debt building up in the code base, but we were wrong. We failed to improve, because we didn't solve the right problems. Eventually, we turned our project around, but with a lot of tough lessons along the way.