Software Design X-Rays

The Perils of Feature Teams

Last year I visited an organization that was in a situation all too familiar, as their features took much longer to implement than expected. But this wasn’t just a case where estimates were used as proxies for management wishes, but a fundamental problem at conflict with the project’s goals. This codebase was developed to replace a hard-to-maintain legacy application and the historic data from the development of the previous application served as a baseline for the project plan. The whole raison d’être of this project was to deliver a codebase that was cheaper to maintain, yet after two years of development, all numbers pointed in the opposite direction.

The slow pace of feature growth wasn’t due to bad code quality, ...