Lean from the Trenches

Example 3: The 7-Meter Class

Here’s a cool way to make a business case for a tech story. One of the classes in our code base was getting way out of control and needed some significant refactoring, but there was some resistance to spending time on that. So, one of the team leads printed out the whole class and laid it across the conference table! It was more than 7 meters long (23 feet)!

Looking at that monstrous printout, everyone clearly saw that we needed a tech story to fix that class immediately! No argument needed. This also illustrated the consequence of being in a hurry and not paying enough attention to design.

We had some fun speculating about future developments along this theme. How about if we estimate features in code-meters ...