This editorial was originally published on 30 Mar 2020. It is being republished as Steve is on holiday.

Things always go wrong. Those of us that build or operate software know that we will have failures at times. These could be while applying a patch, deploying a new system, during a spike in traffic, or perhaps just a mechanical failure somewhere. Most of us fix things and move on, as there's always plenty of other work.

In a few organizations in which I've worked, whenever we had a large issue, we had a retrospective. I think we defined large issue as a VP or CTO become involved, but in any case, we sometimes had to have a retrospective meeting on why things went wrong. Usually these weren't blameless, or psychologically safe. They didn't end up being good meetings, nor did they serve to prevent future problems.

In today's software world where we want to adopt DevOps and build better software, we need retrospectives, both when problems occur, but also periodically as we finish major portions of work. We want to learn and become better at building software, so it pays to spend some time actually assessing how we work as a team. I ran across a post from Thoughtworks that talks a bit about how to make these better.

I don't completely agree with the post, and I certainly think that a retrospective won't solve all the issues we've had. Nor should it. I really see the growth and adaptation of a software team as taking time. When we find lots of problems, the key to making the software development process better is to decide on something to change and try it.

I'm all for an evolutionary approach for a couple reasons. The first is that change is hard and disruptive. If we can change just one or two things, then most of our work continues forward. I don't want a new set of coding techniques and a new build process at once. The second thing is that any change we make might have other consequences. We see this constantly in the world. We try to alter one thing and other parts of our process change. If we change too much at once, we might introduce lots of other problems.

Let's grow and change in small ways, but do so on a regular basis. This is both for the way we work as a team and get our software to customers, as well as the techniques we use to write code. Let's code better, refactor older code when we can, and learn to improve our skills and techniques each month. We'll have a healthier code base over the long term and a healthier team as well.