An oubliette is a particularly unpleasant dungeon characterized by a well-like opening. During medievil times these were used “to forget” (oublier -in French) about “unwanted guests”.
Imagine how you’d feel stuck at the bottom of an oubliette?
It’s probably one of the least inspiring places to be. Expect feelings of despair & hopelessness. You might find yourself asking “What do I do?”, “Why do I bother?”, “It’d be easier to just curl up and let it end”.
I’ve seen development teams end up in similar situations. Untamed defects build up around them over a period of years until it’s too late. The backlog is so deep there’s no hope of getting out. Even committing the entire team to just fixing bugs for over a year won’t save them.
It starts with a brittle codebase. A prior combination of poor architecture, lack of clear standards, lack of debt management and years of too much corner cutting. Often the underlying culprit is repetetive “business pressure” with a team that have not been empowered to say no. This mountain of cut corners and poor decisions offends the sensibilities of all but the most cavalier of developers but once the pit starts to get deep and squishy, what incentive is there to improve?
Your business cannot see delivery of features sacrificed to refactor the codebase, it adds no business value!
The gradual drip drip of quality problems continue as your ability to keep up with demand for new features slowly leaches away, the team slows down further, it costs more and takes longer to develop as the business piles on the pressure for even more new features in less time.
The oubliette spirals towards oblivion and like a prisoner at the bottom of the well, your team and codebase become starved of quality.
Don’t let this happen to you.
(Here’s the first part of how to escape and prevent the oubliette)
About The Captain
Captain Crom started programming and debugging games from magazines on his Brother’s BBC as a small boy in the early 1980s. With early qualifications in both computer science & art and a love of live music it became clear he was destined for bad things.
His tyrannical ways commenced with a degree in Computing & Informatics at Plymouth and from the mid 1990's a career in the software industry. After formative years as "The Scourge of the Thames Valley" between Reading and Bracknell with occasional raids on the San Francisco Bay area, since 2004 he has been seen sailing stretches of the A10 North and South of the Isle of Ely with the primary source of his raids targeted around Cambridge. Sightings have also been rumored as far afield as Scotland, Norway, India, Nevada, Florida and Georgia.
The Captain has served in companies ranging from successful startups and ailing dot-coms to global corporations, spanning roles from IT, consulting, support, development and management through to agile coaching.
The common thread in each of his roles is that he has always chosen to join software product groups - usually large-scale enterprise software. His large-scale product and organizational focus differentiates him from the more common textbook agile captains.
(Other differentiators include his distinctive hoop earrings and love of spiced rum)
The Captain's Agile experience started with a blend of FDD and XP in what he describes as "the most disciplined team he had ever served with". He subsequently moved onto using Scrum and XP blended with Theory Of Constraints, Kanban and Lean philosophies to improve software delivery techniques in other organizations.
He believes every member of a delivery team should spend time with customers supporting the product they produced. “Sitting at the dirty end of a product (or cutlass) completely changes the way you think about business processes and write software for the rest of your softwarefaring career!”
