J. B. Rainsberger

J. B. Rainsberger

J. B. Rainsberger (@jbrains@mastodon.social) is a professional 5-pin bowler who enjoys consulting with software development professionals and the companies that employ them. He guides companies to better results from their software projects while he helps individuals work with less stress. He wants everyone to actually realize the promised benefits of Lightweight approaches to software development, which includes making sense of the "Agile" chaos of the past quarter-century. Companies engage him for remote working sessions, training courses, on-site workshops, and in-person consulting visits. Individuals, especially those stuck in companies that don't have the budget for formal consulting, can get the help they need by joining J. B.'s mentoring group by visiting https://experience.jbrains.ca. (Quite often, they can convince their employer to pay for that!) He lives in Atlantic Canada with his wife, Sarah, who is busy showing the Open Source world how to have quality documentation even with a mostly-volunteer project community. They travel to Europe less often than they used to, which makes each visit even more enjoyable.
Overcoming the Fundamental Misunderstanding About Technical Debt
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Overcoming the Fundamental Misunderstanding About Technical Debt
I have watched well-meaning programmers, technical leaders, and their managers pour their hearts and souls into managing so-called "technical debt" and I worry that they're not getting very far. I believe that a fundamental misunderstanding from the very beginning has led almost everyone down a dark, painful road towards bitter disappointment, endless bickering, failed projects, mounting Imposter Syndrome, and debilitating learned helplessness. Fortunately, I think we can reverse these trends, at least for ourselves, with a combination of techniques from Extreme Programming and general psychology. No, really! You might be surprised to learn that everyone truly wants the same thing, but that some complexities of the human mind have made that difficult to see. Overcoming this fundamental misunderstanding fits squarely into the category of "simple, not easy", so if we want to make progress, then we'd better start now!