A client’s team spent a full week adding a CSV export to their admin panel. Two engineers, clear requirements, maybe a day of actual work. The rest of the time went to understanding existing code well enough to change it safely. That’s what I call codebase drag: when the codebase makes every task take longer than it should. It doesn’t show up in any dashboard or sprint report.
I mean, what we have now is a clique of ideologically-aligned people who insta-approve each other’s bad PRs outside their domain and ignore or jam-up the PRs of people outside their clique.
You can say it’s a failure of management, but this is the primary tool used by the ideologues. And I’ve seen it used so at various places.
What I haven’t seen is a real dissemination of knowledge about the code. At least not above and beyond looking at the code and using blame to see the changesets and looking at the associated issues.
This kind of social behavior is corporate politics and a failure of management of course.
Okay, I’ll go tell management they’ve failed. 🙄