This morning's edition of the weekly dev. meeting had a little more animated back-and-forth than usual. Mainly it was about how to flag a line-item in the issue-tracking system to indicate that it was supposed to be pushed into production during off-hours.
That sort of software promotion is not at all the norm, though, so I couldn't help but think (at the time) that we were collectively over-thinking the whole thing. Then a little red flag went up in my brain and I thought: "Uh-oh: We're trying to use process to compensate for lack of communication, aren't we? Gack. Here we go again..."
Fortunately, it didn't turn out that way. But as I headed back to my cube a bit later, I realized that, to an extent, process is communication. In the sense of signalling what has been done, and what there is still to do and, normally, who is to do it. The trick, of course, is to understand the limits of process' vocabulary and grammar. And, of course, be always wary of conflating the two.
