Identify Development Pains and Resolve Them with Idea Flow

With the explosion of new frameworks, a mountain of automation, and our applications distributed across hundreds of services in the cloud, the level of complexity in software development is growing at an insane pace. With increased complexity comes increased costs and risks. When diagnosing unexpected behavior can take days, weeks, or sometimes months, all while our release is on the line, our projects plunge into chaos. In the invisible world of software development, how do we identify what's causing our pain? How do we escape the chaos? Janelle Klein presents a novel approach to measuring the chaos, identifying the causes, and systematically driving improvement with a data-driven feedback loop. Rather than measuring the problems in the code, Janelle suggests measuring the "friction in Idea Flow", the time it takes a developer to diagnose and resolve unexpected confusion, which disrupts the flow of progress during development. With visibility of the symptoms, we can identify the cause—whether it's bad architecture, collaboration problems, or technical debt. Janelle discusses how to measure Idea Flow, why it matters, and the implications for our teams, our organizations, and our industry.