Process vs People Debate

I've read on HN that "processes are organizational scar tissue", I think it applies here.

You can hardly blame the tool for that, it's your process that's flawed.

You obviously have a process. It's just that you haven't formalized it yet and/or that it's too convoluted to be easily expressed in a marketable form for most human beings.

As a friend once said, "You can't software your way out of a process problem."

There's no magic bullets for this sort of thing. Try something and see if it works. If it doesn't work, try something else. Incrementally improve your processes.

You failed as soon as you think "process"A process is a hardcoded way of do thing, which is deficient because it cannot react to an ever-changing worldA better way to handle things is by defining "what" should be done, not "how" it should be done

...until codified process becomes the problem. It never ends!

Just like making a single bad hire invalidates making ten great hires, setting up a single bad process invalidates every other good process you have set up. "Process" has a life of its own. Process is never re-evaluated. Process accumulates. People follow it mindlessly, wasting time and energy. When you know the solution to a problem, do you want to write a mini-proposal? Set up feedback sessions? Timebox, dogfood, canary-deploy? Heck, "process" will make you not want to do a

At this point in time this is absolutely a "people and process" problem. But also the process that is there has been excercised and is known to folks you may hire. Trying to come up with less of it (or with a different version of it) dramatically shrinks the number of people who can be productive on your product from day 1, and is not a choice to be made lightly. There is also a number of people who will then be spending time convincing you that the "none" or "less"

The only thing worse than a strict process is a quickly changing process. Because then people will be forced to keep track of the changes and it becomes even more difficult to become compliant. Ideal process would include the feedback from day 1 and iterate either based on demand or at fixed intervals placed as far as possible.