The ratchet

Today I'd like to talk about a useful tool to have in your leadership toolkit. I call it the ratchet. What is a ratchet? Ratchets are a technique for ensuring a change goes only in one direction. In engineering, an example would be a code coverage ratchet. Let's say your testing covers 50% of your code and you want to make sure that that is trending up. You could add a ratchet that every addition to the code base increases the code coverage. How you make a ratchet Someone with some power says what the ratchet is, and adds the process or automation to make it happen. So for example, a leader might say, “we have a goal to improve our code coverage. This is important as it makes our codebase better and more reliable. It makes our jobs easier. So I’m putting a code coverage tool in place, and it will fail to accept code that lowers our code coverage rate. You can override it in emergencies, but the goal is to bake this into the way we do our work” Why a ratchet? They’re a pretty fabulous…