Problem Creep: Local Development On-Boarding

I’m putting together a talk about how one of our applications has a dozen setup steps across half a dozen code repositories.

On-boarding a new team member onto the application for local development was scary. The new team member’s on-boarding time could be anywhere from two to three days. Two to three days! 🤦

The on-boarding experience got so bad that when new team members would get a computer upgrade from the company, they would hesitate! A shiny, new, faster computer to do you job and you say: “no”??

This is a bad sign: when current developers do not want to have a new computer to do their job because setting up the application again would be too much work (and fraught with uncertainty).

More on this tomorrow.