February 2022 Summaries

Aspect shares its experience in guiding build system migrations, emphasizing principles that prioritize human psychology, minimize disruption, and ensure gradual, logical change. They highlight the importance of nurturing positive perceptions early in the migration process to prevent entrenched negative opinions among developers, which can occur due to tribal thinking and misconceptions about new tools like Bazel. Maintaining familiar workflows and minimizing retraining helps preserve goodwill, while changing one aspect at a time aids in diagnosing issues and understanding impact. Aspect emphasizes the use of a "ratchet" mechanism to prevent regression once improvements are made, and stresses the importance of continuous, non-disruptive progress to avoid dissatisfaction and potential backlash from stakeholders. They advise closing feedback loops by addressing root causes rather than just symptoms and recommend leaving the codebase unchanged whenever possible to avoid unnecessary disruptions, ensuring that changes to the build system do not require code alterations. The goal is to leave minimal traces of intervention, allowing clients to maintain ownership of their code post-migration.