A key reason to work branchlessly, even if you still gateway an actual deployment: the more people who are using your code, the more *ways* they are using it, which often surfaces bugs more earlier than any testing regime.
When we're all pushing to head, we're all using all of our code during development. Because people are people, they use your app in ways that are different than you do, and different from your best coding pal, too.
My team recently got two new users to bang on the system. They're "friends & family": it's an internal project, and they're part of the team that will eventually use it everyday twice a day to do mission-critical work.
The bugs are flowing like cheap wine at a grad student party. And it's *great*! The complexity of modern software means lots of variant paths and cases. Having people coming at your code from different places is incredibly helpful, especially in code you couldn't microtest.
Sounds scary, I know, but it's really not. The cost of never making a mistake is very often never moving at all, so we're going to make mistakes. The hard part isn't fixing mistakes, it's finding them. Having real users really using is pure gold.
An absolutely central requirement here: *encourage* *your* *bug* *finders*. Make sure they know how much they're helping you.
To encourage them, do these things: 1) actually thank them. 2) prioritize their problems, 3) attack with vim and vigor. 4) share the developing story, especially the replication problem (if there is one, and there often is). 5) tell them when you've fixed it.
I know a lot of teams put bug-work at the bottom of their queue, for after they've made their silly "sprint commitment". This is very often a terrible mistake, so don't default to it. Default to bug-fix-on-top.
When you do lean to deferring, get the bug-finder involved in that dialog. Even defects I'm not going to fix right now are important and valuable to me, and that's one way to show that.
We're talking about free expert bug-finders here. That's an incredibly scarce resource, and we want to do everything in our power to conserve it when we get it.
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.