mike.mainguy

Git is Great! As a distributed source code tool, git is great. I love that when I'm on an airplane I can commit code without a wireless connection and have be able to unwind what I was doing. It was clearly designed with the "offline" model in mind. The idea I can create a quick branch, experiment, make massive sweeping changes, and just drop the whole thing if I realize it sucked...is AWERSOME! For a fact this puts it ahead of it's open source predecessors (namely...SVN, CVS, and RCS). But perhaps a victim of it's success What I observe, however, is that a lot of folks have taken up a development model where "everything is a branch" and we end up with roles like "pull request approval engineer" (not a real title, but if you end up doing that job, you'll know that your doing it). This problem happens when the number of public branches/forks reaches a count and complexity that far exceed any value they could have possibly served. ...

Most organizations of more than one or two people need some sort of process to facilitate change. It really isn't feasible to have 20+ ( or 2000) people all doing their own thing without any way to coordinate things. In order to manage this, organizations invariably institute change management or change control processes. What often happens is that these processes get focused on eliminating or mitigating the NEGATIVE aspects of change and very often ignore that changes also can have a POSITIVE aspect. In the end, many places end up crystallizing their process, it grows out of control, and it becomes difficult or impossible to create any change without the entire process breaking down. Why does this happen? I believe the the fundamental problem is that most organizations ignore the necessity of some sort of change management process (other than ad-hoc) until a dramatic event causes them to rethink their approach. Once this disaster happens, the positive aspects of the pre...