Somebody on your team keeps merging without waiting for the tests. You do not want an awkward conversation, so you post in the team channel instead. Friendly reminder, everyone, please make sure the pipeline is green before merging.
It feels tactful. It is usually the least effective thing you could do.
Watch what happens next. The careful people, the ones who always wait for green, read it and worry. Did I do something? Some of them become more cautious than they need to be. The one person the message was aimed at reads it, assumes it is about somebody else, and carries on exactly as before. You have unsettled the people doing it right and missed the person doing it wrong.
There is a quieter cost too. Everybody can usually work out who the note was really for. Now the team knows there is a problem, knows who it is, and knows you would rather hint than speak to them. That last part damages trust in you more than the original problem ever did.
If the issue belongs to one person, talk to that person. Privately, soon, and specifically. The last three merges went in before the tests finished, and one of them broke the build for the afternoon. What is getting in the way? Sometimes there is a real reason: slow pipelines, pressure from somebody else, a misunderstanding about what green means. You only learn that by asking the person involved.
A team wide message is right when the problem really is team wide. If half the team skips the tests, that is not several individual failures. It is a signal that the process makes skipping easy or tempting, and the fix belongs to the process. Say what you noticed, without names, and change something concrete: make the check mandatory, speed up the suite, agree on a rule together.
The test is simple. Before you post a general reminder, ask who you actually have in mind. If the answer is one or two names, the message belongs in a conversation, not in a channel.
Being direct with one person takes a few uncomfortable minutes. Being indirect with everyone costs you a little of every relationship on the team.
– Asael Shinder
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