Any organisation drags behind it some amount of dogma and myth. However, a full understanding of this may not be sufficient to fix it. Indeed, a large amount of time, effort, and mental health can be preserved by conceding certain sacreligious truths to those who gain from their concealment. No amount of evidence of reason will help you once you are considered to pose a threat. Walk away.
Try not to die fighting on the following hills:
- Merge requests are a universally accepted integration practice. (Why Pull Requests Are A BAD IDEA)
- The purpose of Agile is to maximise velocity. (Kevlin Henney - ACCU 2025)
- Granularity is a waste of time. Bigger changes are more economical.
- Well-planned stories should take hours or days, not weeks or months: MMMSS – A Closer Look at Steps
- Small, isolated changes can never be valuable: SE Radio 615: Kent Beck on “Tidy First?” (00:18:53)
- Effort should only be made to improve quality when metrics dictate.
- Wait for the agreed complexity thresholds to be exceeded before breaking up functions. Counters: SE Radio 615: Kent Beck on “Tidy First?” (06:15)
- Write tests only when code coverage is below 80%: Don't Chase Code Coverage!
- A modular systems is necessarily a well architected system, regardless of coupling, or cohesion.
- Ease of use is more valuable than simplicity. Counter: Simple Made Easy
- Separating functional changes from non-functional changes is a waste of time and should never be encouraged. Counter: SE Radio 615: Kent Beck on “Tidy First?” (15:09)
- Standards are a good thing, to be created eagerly.
- The purpose of DevSecOps is to control essential infrastructure centrally.