Why Resilience Demands More Than Survival

TL;DR; True resilience in software teams means improving technical health after setbacks, not just surviving them. Key practices include strengthening automated tests, CI/CD, observability, and architecture, while avoiding superficial Agile claims. Leaders should prioritize system health and sustainable delivery, making resilience a shared responsibility and ongoing investment.

In resilient organisations, resilience is not about bouncing back; it is about bouncing forward. Teams that survive chaos but leave behind technical debt are not resilient — they are brittle.

Real resilience comes from embedding rigorous engineering discipline. Every time you patch a production issue, you must ask:

Did we improve our automated tests?
Did we harden CI/CD pipelines?
Did we strengthen observability and monitoring?
Did we reinforce the architecture or code quality?

Without these, you are not resilient — you are hiding behind Agile theatre.

Detecting Agile Bullshit in Resilience Talk

Here is how to spot teams and leaders pretending they are resilient:

“We’re Agile!” but they cannot deliver usable product every sprint.
“We do Scrum!” but there is no working increment, just carryover.
“We’re resilient!” but they rely on manual rollbacks and hero debugging.
“We have CI/CD!” but deployments are locked behind manual approvals or compliance bottlenecks.

If you hear these, stop and challenge them. Resilient systems show up in empirical delivery, not in slide decks or postmortem write-ups.

Technical Health: Your Best Resilience Investment

Operational resilience is engineered in the small:

Small batch sizes
Continuous delivery to expose issues early
Automated recovery processes
Telemetry and feedback loops driving change

Resilience is a leadership accountability. Product Owners set priorities that invest in system health, not just features. Scrum Masters challenge process rot and technical compromises. Engineering leaders fund cross-team technical enablement.

Without technical health, there is no sustainable delivery. Without sustainable delivery, there is no real resilience.

I look forward to continuing our work together. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or concerns.

Best regards,
Martin Hinshelwood
Naked Agility Ltd.

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