The Art of Technical Decision Making
summary
Argues teams get better at choices by following a concrete workshop: one to three 1–1.5 hour sessions with sticky notes, grouped benefits and opportunities versus costs and risks, three votes per person to surface the biggest trade-off, then sleep on it and use fallbacks (manager decision, spike, majority vote, or survey experts). Example: five-person Android team uses the process, ends up rejecting the new stack for the big project but adopts it for prototyping. Recommends documenting outcomes with architectural decision records/RFCs.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Intro
- 2:391. Fears 2. Decision making concepts 3. A process
- 5:29The Fear of Decision Making in Teams
- 10:23A winning technical decision survives change
- 10:39Team decision making
- 14:16Consensus is finding a way to move forward, with a shared understanding
- 17:59Example Should we use Ruby on Rails?
- 18:36What is the goal or problem? Scope? How much time should we spend deciding? What is the cost of delay? Of reversing it? What are the risks and opportunities? What is our context and appetite for risk? What is the conflict?
- 20:15Check in with our emotions
- 22:13List the options
- 23:11Evaluate the options
- 26:00Are we ready to decide or do we need more info?
- 30:22Book: The Right Decision, Stein Book: Collaboration Explained, Tabaka Talk A young lady's guide to technical decision making Majors Blog Architecture Decision Records, Nygard
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