Little Red Riding Hood and the forest of broken windows

On the road to agility there are many obstacles to tackle.

One of them being that while everybody is trying to keep the deadline and deliver all the features requested, tests break. Many tests break. Way too many tests break in a short period of time.

New goals need to be met while the old ones are abandoned. (Aka PBIs get reprioritized). Code remains half done or dysfunctional in the system. Tests stay broken.

The “broken windows effect” kicks in.

Orientation gets lost and then it goes south from there.

This talk is about a way out of that forest of broken windows. It describes how to transform “deleted” tests into a valuable measurement of code quality and how to make the stakeholders pay attention to quality again.

And eventually deliver value in time.

“Deleting tests” might be “a bit” controversial.

That’s the beauty of it. Special measures for times of change.