Process Bankruptcy

It could be a release system involving many manual steps, which worked when the codebase was 1/10th of its current size. Now it requires an entire release team.

Do engineers need to complete a checklist for every Pull Request they merge? Do you still need that on-call rotation where engineers acknowledge, and silence alerts 99% of the time?

Teams assigned to these components reduce their ambitions to fix the technical debt. Push back on newcomers’ attempts to settle the debt, and ask to get re-assigned elsewhere.

The team exists in a slow creep/boiling frog situation where existing processes have become ineffective. It may be more comfortable not to upset the status quo but more effective to remove useless processes.

Declare process bankruptcy: not every process is meant to exist forever.