The Roadmap
When Gary was called in for a meeting with a few of his managers- because of course he had several- he thought it was going to be for an "attaboy", because things had been going really well for the past few months. Gary had inherited a mess, and taken over a nightmare application. It was the kind of application that should be a simple CRUD-style data-driven app, but somehow despite only having 20ish entities it managed, someone had generated 500+ controllers for managing them. Most of those controllers were copy/pasted code with minor changes in the WHERE clause of a SQL query. And that was just the code. The infrastructure was similarly a mess, with duplicate resources provisioned in their cloud host. There was no CI/CD, no unit tests to speak of, no deployment process that wasn't "manually copy these files and pray". And uptime? You've heard about "five nines", but this product was lucky to get even one nine. Especially because the manual deployment process meant a few hours of downtime. And that was just the infrastructure. The backlog was similarly messy. There were lots of tasks- many thousands- but not a single one had a priority. Most of the tasks were something like, "Fix database timeouts", or "Bug 531" with no description to explain what they were. At best, some of the "new feature" tasks linked to a Google Doc that explained a software roadmap that had been last updated in 2020. So with no guidance, Gary and the rest of his team got to work. Cloud costs were massive. Just cutting the duplicate resources would help, but with actual planning it wasn't hard to find even bigger wins. In total, Gary got the cloud costs down 60%- essentially saving the company a small multiple of his salary every year. With that out of the way, getting a CI/CD pipeline running was next. Within a few weeks, manual deployments were gone. Everything was automated. Downtime nearly vanished. And now, with all the cost savings in cloud resources, for a fraction of what they were paying, it was easy to automate provisioning test environments for each new feature. So Gary was very ready for some congratulations when he sat down with management. He was prepared to discuss all the wins he and the rest of the developers on the project had gotten over the past few months. "I'm sure you know why we're sitting down," Manager the First said when they settled into the conference room. "I'm sure," said Manager the Second. "We have some concerns about your performance," Manager the Third said. "My performance?" Gary asked. "Yes," said Manager the First. "Let me pull up the backlog." "And the roadmap," said Manager the Second. "Yes, I'm getting that up too, thank you." The trio of managers struggled with pulling up the appropriate pages, and after about 15 minutes, gave up. Instead, they discussed their complaint without visual aids. "You haven't completed any of the tasks on the roadmap. Bug 673 has been open since you started on the team. None of the roadmap milestones have been touched. There's absolutely no progress." "Okay, but that document was wildly out of date," Gary said. "Instead I put cycles into solving the actual problems we're having. I've saved the company a huge amount of money. I've gotten our development cycle time down to a fraction of what it was. And we have basically no downtime!" "That's all very nice, I'm sure," said Manager the Third. "But none of that was on our roadmap." "Well, maybe we should set up a meeting to go over the roadmap," Gary said. "Because a lot of the tasks on there don't make much sense right now-" "I don't think that's a good use of time," Manager the Second said. "Large meetings are expensive. Just stick to the roadmap, please." With that, the meeting ended. Gary went back to work… … updating his resume. [Advertisement] Keep the plebs out of prod. Restrict NuGet feed privileges with ProGet. Learn more.
