Introduction

Just another Monday Morning

It's Monday morning; you head into the office (substitute for virtual space if reading in 2020...)

You're hoping to keep your head down, ease yourself gently into the working week, perhaps try to remember what it was you working on before the weekend arrived.

Without thinking, you raise your head above the monitor and boom, your boss catches your eye.

They smile, you smile back. After a few awkward seconds of polite greetings and questions about each other's weekends, you make a casual retreat, slowly lowering your head back below the monitor.

But something's changed. They're standing up, and coming straight towards you!

You scramble to put your headphones on, but it's too late...

"Er, before you get stuck in this morning, could you just..."

Your heart sinks.

The request sounds reasonable enough:

• Could you just add a field for the user's post code to the contact us form
• Could you possibly modify the logic for sending emails so it doesn't send on Sundays
• Would you mind just updating the user's profile page to say happy birthday (if it's their birthday)

But it's not that simple.

It's never that simple.

You spend the rest of the morning wearing out the F12 key on your keyboard, desperately tracking down the multitude of places where this feature resides. You go from one service to another, through managers, helpers and factories until finally, and with no small amount of relief, you finally figure out what needs tweaking.

You make the change, run the application and everything looks fine, but then something catches your eye.

Another part of the application (a screen you weren't even working on) doesn't look quite right. You get an uncomfortable feeling, this can't be related to your change, can it?

You didn't even know those two screens were connected!

What should have been a "small change" has cost you the morning and you're only just getting started.