Despite our best efforts to maintain a clean, productive code base that is free of technical debt, actually pulling this off is not that easy. Besides the challenge of trying to schedule technical debt work with the constant pressure of new features, deciding what to do to make things better just isn't that clear cut. How do we even know if we've made things better? We seldom get objective feedback.
This presentation will introduce Idea Flow Mapping, a learning tool for reflecting on our experience. It shifts the way we look at friction in software to focusing on the flow of ideas. When we read code and try to understand the ideas, friction is what gets in the way. When we try to add something new to the software, friction is what makes it a challenge.
Idea Flow Mapping tracks key indicators of friction: the times we struggle, the times we throw out our code, and the time we spend stuck and just thinking. Our craft is dependent on the process of understanding, it's what makes code productive. With feedback on the causes of software friction, we can learn to get better, faster.