Everyone in software development knows the words: ‘just add this small thing and…’. Mostly the people requesting the addition don’t have to live with the consequences. These consequences double each and every time you add another option to an existing structure. Every option you add, adds to the number of combinations your software must be capable to handle and combinations double according to the formula 2^n. So when you say yes for the 7th time.

Today a respected colleague called and we had a conversation on technology choices. A team choose the React framework over the Angular framework and that caused a stir at the company. He asked me what my top 5 elements for selection would be. We ended up that a single question to answer should be enough. Will the whole team take the responsibility to make this choice a success ? Sometimes the actual technology matters, most of the times, it matters more that ownership is at the right spot.

A little history: Scrum, KanBan and DevOps Over the past 15 years, the IT industry has taken to working ‘agile’, often by introducing Scrum. Scrum is development process, which creates a cadence of sprints that last a few weeks each. User stories are used to determine the work to be done. These user stories are planned, committed, built and delivered. There is also room to evaluate the work, the object being to improve together.