8 Breaking Changes
In government, we had a saying, “The only thing the government hates more than change is the way things are.” The same inertia lingers over legacy systems. It is impossible to improve a large, complex, debt-ridden system without breaking it. If you’re lucky, the resulting outages will be resolved quickly and result in minimum data loss, but they will happen.
Another expression that was popular among my colleagues in government was “air cover.” To have air cover was to have confidence that the organization would help your team survive such inevitable breakages. It was to have someone who trusted and understood the value of change and could protect the team. As a team lead, my job was to secure that air cover. When I moved ...
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