Defence of technical excellence - working with causal loops

In meetings with non-technical stakeholders an image can speak a thousand words. In that case a simulation speaks hundreds of thousands! While we’re dealing with technical details, implementation, environment problems, quality is not something done only bottoms-up. It is also something that needs to be explained and supported top-down.

In meetings with non-technical stakeholders an image can speak a thousand words. In that case a simulation speaks hundreds of thousands! While we’re dealing with technical details, implementation, environment problems, quality is not something done only bottoms-up. It is also something that needs to be explained and supported top-down.

Quite often, when faced with the speed versus quality trade-off we unwillingly stumble into a fallacy that gets many teams stuck in negative feedback loops - sacrificing quality for speed. As a result both are lost sooner or later. Teams find their backlogs filled with bugs, their stakeholders frustrated by missed deadlines and the teams themselves unhappy and stressed.

In this episode of Loosely Coupled we’re joined by a defender of technical excellence - Chris Simon! Coming back to the stream, Chris will guide us through the path of Systems thinking, and in particular using causal loop diagrams to identify the feedback loops at play that can shed light on how and why the fallacy is so tempting yet so destructive.

We’ll dive into the building of a range of causal feedback loops to visualise the underlying causes of problems. We’ll also experiment a bit, to practice framing the causality, so we can use such visualisations to advocate for the practices of technical excellence that counter the pressures of the fallacy, such as collaborative modelling with domain-driven design, test driven development and living documentation.