time-to-horse

Brian Hicks, December 22, 2020

Some colleagues of mine at NoRedInk coined a new term: time-to-horse, the time it takes you to get on your horse and ride.

They used this in the context of their team getting familiar with a new area of our code, but I think it's also useful for talking about how long it takes someone to make meaningful contributions when joining a team.

I think you probably want your time-to-horse to be as low as possible in either case. There are a bunch of things that affect this (like documentation, pairing and collaboration practices, and continuous integration pipeline quality) but I think they all boil down to "do you have fast feedback loops?"