Donella Meadows book, Thinking in Systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight on how to think about systems, how to control systems and how systems change and control themselves. A system is a group of interacting, interrelated or interdependent parts unified to have a purpose. Examples can be a heating system, a tree, a human, a social system, an IT system, and IT Teams working as a part in a company which is also again a system.
For me, the most interesting part of the book is about system traps. They are traps in where systems can go wrong without notice. Since reading the book I started observing these traps in my day to day work. Traps like seeking the wrong goal with a code coverage threshold, shifting the burden to an intervener by letting a separate QA team be responsible for quality. Join me in this talk where I will go into more of these system traps I observed in IT teams, and what I did to get out of these traps.
