In comic books, we call it the gutters – the spaces between panels where the reader envisions the transition, things happening, work being down, and actions happening.
In software, this is the space between the tickets you are assigned to work on and the code you write. The gutter exists, stuff happens between those two things, thinking emerges, design happens, and we don’t always know what it all is, but it happens there – it’s the sweet spot where the magic happens.
The Gutters hold immense amounts of promise but they can also let you down, the more space between your code and tickets, the more one falls away from the other, and the greater the chance for something to go wrong. This is why when it comes to code and tickets, we don’t want wide-open, unsuspecting, large gutters – we want them to be thin, clear, and understandable.
So you always know what is happening next.
