09 Dec 2021
The traditional methodology of software deployment, still alive and well in corporate America, is a process defined and managed by issuing tickets. These tickets allow other teams to perform functions that a single developer, or team, cannot perform on their own. It is also very manual and requires more reviews than is absolutely necessary. You may think that I am against tickets, reviews, or the process entirely, but you would only be partially right.
I am against unnecessary work. I am 100% in favor of building systems and processes to support them that allow for business goals to be accomplished. Most businesses have the goal of NOT losing money. It has been my experience that the larger the company, the more process is required, which means more tickets for a growing number of teams to perform their specific functions. It is not fun. However, given the size of a company, and the number of zeroes in the revenue column, the process generally grows larger. This is not a function of stopping progress. It is a function of stopping mistakes that could cause some form of loss, monetarily or otherwise.
Maybe you have written, or you utilize, the greatest automation system ever created. It builds, packages, and then deploys your software to the specified environments. No matter how automated you are there are still tickets that need to created and approved. Reviews must happen, even if they are automated, to record the review in the ticketing system. Regardless of the system you use or how the workflow is set up, somebody, or something, in your organization cares about that system. So should you.
The tickets and their history are there for others in your organization. Not you. You may not care about a change request ticket and think it is truly a CYA activity for moving your software through environments. It kinda of is but not really. Those tickets exist for others to perform their job. You may not know them, depending upon the size of your organization, but they do exist. They are doing their job , much like yourself. They may not operate as fast as you would like. When working with ticketing systems, nobody does anything as fast as you would like. It is an inefficient communication system, but it is a communication system.
Trust me, if something were to break, folks will begin to look at those tickets to try and figure out what happened. Ticketing systems are the shared consciousness of an organization. If something happens there is probably a ticket. If you encounter an individual who asks for a ticket to do something, pretty much anything (you know the type), they are not trying to avoid work. They are trying to document their work in the established system that the organization uses. Don’t hate it. It just makes using it that much worse.
If the process is truly broken you should try and fix it. If you don’t get to fix it, at least there will be a ticket with the request documenting that you tried. That and $1 should get you a cup of coffee at McDonald’s.
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