Superstar Developer is your greatest risk

Does delivery stop when your hero developer goes isn't in the office?

👋 Hello, this is Valentina with the free edition of the Optivem Journal. I help Engineering Leaders & Senior Software Developers apply TDD in Legacy Code.

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Your superstar developer is your greatest asset.

And your greatest risk.

Every company wants them. — The 10x engineer. The problem solver. The one who never says, “That’s not possible.”

Only the superstar developer takes on difficult tasks (and the rest of the team takes on the easier tasks).

If there’s an emergency bug fix, the superstar developer fixes it quickly (because the rest of the team cannot do it).

They know the system inside out.

They’re the firefighter, the hero, the one who saves the day.

The superstar developer can pull all-nighters if needed.

The superstar takes their laptop on vacation.

They’re always there. Reliable. Brilliant.

Until one day… they’re not.

What happens when they burn out? What happens when they leave the company?

That’s when your biggest asset becomes your greatest risk.

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That’s when you realize you can’t just rely on high-performance individuals. You need to build a high-performance organization. You need to build high-performance teams.

You need to move from hero-driven development to team-driven delivery.

From “one person knows everything” to “knowledge is shared, and delivery doesn’t depend on a single person.”

That’s when you start building teams instead of bottlenecks.

How can you achieve scalable software delivery?

The answer isn’t in hiring more superstars.

Do one thing right — Continuous Delivery. Everything else will follow.

Continuous Delivery isn’t just about clicking “deploy” automatically. It’s about having fast feedback loops through automated tests. It ensures every code change goes through a repeatable, verified pipeline so teams can release safely at any time.

Shared ownership is enforced because test failures in pipelines make it clear when something breaks.

Continuous Delivery transforms hero-driven firefighting into safe & fast delivery, i.e. agile delivery.

Without tests we never know:

• Is everything working together?

• Is everything working as expected?

When most developers hear of “tests”, they think of Unit Tests and achieving 80% code coverage. Some might even think of TDD, where Unit Tests and high coverage are a natural by-product.

Developers think that by having Unit Tests they will have regression bug protection, which will enable them to deliver software safer and faster. I used to think this way too, in my early career as a developer.

But this thinking is completely WRONG.

You can have thousands of green Unit Tests, but your main scenario (e.g. order placement) is failing on your QA Environment.

That’s why we need Acceptance Tests, which would verify User Story Acceptance Criteria, and ensure that the system is behaving correctly, e.g. is order placement working correctly? (These tests then act as automated regression tests for the future too).

Acceptance Tests cover the entire workflow, e.g., the customer placing an order through the UI and seeing the correct order total, as well as verifying that the available inventory has been updated.

Unit Tests check the behavior of classes - e.g. verifying that the calculateTotalPrice() method correctly applies a discount for an order.

Acceptance Tests are a must-have for regression bug protection. Unit Tests are there to help developers localize business logic bugs sooner.

By starting with Acceptance Tests, you define what “done” looks like for the system, and then Unit Tests ensure each component behaves correctly to support that overall behavior.

That’s why I find Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) as crucial: it starts from shared team understanding of the requirements, helps us convert those requirements into executable requirements to guide the developers and ultimately verify whether system behavior satisfies the executable requirements. This is a prerequisite to achieving safe and fast delivery…. helping us move away from hero-driven firefighting towards agile delivery.

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