Benjamin Day

Two kinds of thinking: Extractive: "How do I get more from what I have?" Generative: "What could this become?" Most orgs drifted extractive without realizing it. Every metric looks fine while the soul of the place shrivels. New post — first in a series. benday.com/blog/generativ…

Quality is everyone's job. Not a phase. Not a department. Not a gate at the end. Everyone every day.

Find a way for them to change without changing. People don't resist improvement. They resist being told they're doing it wrong.

Your developers used to care. Now they just do what they're told. That's not a performance problem. That's a leadership problem.

If your company has been profitable for 10+ years but can't ship new capabilities your success has probably calcified into your architecture.

Stop estimating. Start counting. How many items did your team finish last week? That number tells you more than any story point debate ever will.

For 20 years we said 'the code IS the documentation.' AI agents don't get context from code. The documentation renaissance is coming.

'Solving the DevOps problem' isn't actually a DevOps problem. It's an architecture problem wearing a DevOps hat.

Your developers are doing 'clever' things with Entity Framework. In software 'clever' is not a compliment.

'We're 65% confident it ships by March 15. 85% confident by March 22.' That's a conversation stakeholders can actually act on.

A branch is an integration credit card. You will pay eventually. The longer you carry the balance the worse the interest.

'Yeah, we do GitHub Flow.' No...I'll bet you don't.

You have 5 product backlogs and 5 developers. You think you have 5 teams. You have 1 team with 5 bosses who can't see each other's demands.

Technical debt is compound interest. The $25k fix becomes $100k because every layer you peel back exposes another layer underneath.

Angela Dugan (⁦⁦@ChicagoALM⁩ ) and ⁦@benday⁩ discuss how to Master the Human Factors in Engineering. Hands-on lab day at #VSLive is in full swing!

The core of project management isn't 'management' at all. It's delivery.

Brittleness increases when redundancy gets optimized away. Just a thought.

@ErikEJ Awesome! Nicely done.

@benday My database is always in source control! github.com/rr-wfm/MSBuild…

Your app is in version control. Your database isn't. Which version of the database goes with which version of the app? Nobody knows.

Your AI agents are writing code your team can't maintain. Working beautifully... until it doesn't. I call it Comprehension Debt.