Making Choices

As a coach, I sometimes face software team members telling me they have no choice.

"We'd love to try TDD. Honestly. We understand it's important, valuable and that we'll rip off great benefits out of it. But it requires some time to refactor portions of our code so that it becomes testable [yes, this was a big legacy system, 1+ million lines of code, virtually no automated test] and managers have commanded us not to spend any time on this refactoring. There's nothing we can do. We must obey and we have no choice."

This team was spending a third of its time on manual testing. It was still plagued with regressions of all sorts. Managers were indeed very stressed out because of the team's poor velocity. They didn't understand the theoritical value of automated tests. Hence, they would not invest a week in getting the opportunity to evaluate its empirical value. This was a tough situation for everyone.

But I wouldn't agree that there was nothing the developers could do.

Managerial authority may look unescapable and socially rewarding to follow -- especially in a society where we've been trained since the earliest age to obey parents and teachers. Nonetheless, if your manager were to forbid you to take pee breaks (to save time) or ordered you to just type with your left hand (for whatever reasons you could imagine), you might choose to obey them but I doubt you would do so.

What I want to suggest here is that we all draw a line under which obeying someone is acceptable, and beyond which it becomes questionable. This line differs for everyone, depending on what you're ready to accept and what rewards you expect by doing so. But there lies the choice. You'll always have the freedom to decide where to draw the line. As French as I could be, I'm not saying you should rebel and cut the heads of your kings. I'm merely saying that your obeying to someone is a choice that you (and you alone, in the end) are making -- and that it's just one option among others. Maybe this is the right thing to do. But if you feel it is not, you always have the option to disobey and do what you know better. Or put yourself in the position where you can walk away, walk away indeed, and find a better place to work.