Why are we afraid of the truth?

One year ago, my co-founders and I started GitBetter.io. The idea was simple. It is still simple to me.

We want to eliminate the thousands of meetings that occur around what developers do. Track the repository and find the answers in the code. As an architect and lead developer, I can find trace this activity. But as teams grow, you need to aggregate information. One set of eyes does not scale.

I remember how angry it made me when a scrum master demanded that developers track their hours. Why do you need to do that when you have the code itself? I was furious. This may not apply to architects or designers who support the developers, but for the developers it should work.

I started coding and I got a lot of information. Quality was and still is elusive; we know tha a line of code can have the same weight as two thousand. I what I found gives a pretty good idea about overall activity, at least enough to be useful. Quality will always be contentious and subject to the beholder, or the end user, or both.

When I shared my work with my colleagues, I got a lot of negative feedback. One of my friends called me a traitor and asked “are we in Game of Thrones?” Clearly not. And I kept going. GitBetter needs a lot of work, but I know that there are others out there who are looking for the truth. I can’t be the only one.

Going back to the original queistion: Why are we afraid of the truth?

If a developer does not check in any code for a month, that’s the truth.
If a developer breaks a build, that’s the truth.
If a developer works over a weekend, that is also the truth.

GitBetter.io gives you these facts. Now we need to fill in the gaps. But that does not mean punishment. It doesn’t even mean management. It just means we need to face the truth.

For example, I used GitBetter and saw that a colleague nearly killed himself with a huge refactor a year ago, then spent months without changing a line of code. There are many reasons for this, least of all have to do with hours “logged” for a scrum master, or that he should be more productive. There is a deeper story here. This is where the truth leads to empathy. Maybe the project killed his desire. We know what he is capable of doing — those are the facts.

We should not be afraid of the truth. It is our job to take this information and fill in the gaps.