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The epistemology of software quality – Increment: Teams:

Work-life balance and wellness impact us in a subtler way than technical practices do. It’s easy to point to a bug and say, “This couldn’t have happened in Rust.” It’s a lot harder to point to a bug and say, “This wouldn’t have happened if the programmer wasn’t stressed out and sleep-deprived.” There’s no feedback loop that pushes developers away from too much stress and too little sleep.

In contrast, there are plenty of things that push us toward it. Things like scope creep. Like being understaffed. Like production fires, or last-minute changes, or an upcoming release, or bad bosses, or company culture. Because it’s easier to ask more of people than to address the sickness in the system.

Wait—you mean treating the people on your team like actual humans rather than interchangeable widgets tends to make them happier and more productive? CRAZY!

Sadly, this sort of approach makes it harder to generate metrics and populate executive dashboards.

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