Inspired by A Million Ways to Die on Wall Street, I thought I would throw together this list of A Million Ways to Die in Tech. OK, it’s not really a million ways. It’s four.

1. Not having standups. I like the standing concept, but you don’t have to. Still, short daily checkins, alongside weekly checkins are a good thing for teams.

2. Keeping engineers away from customers. If you’ve never seen an engineer reaction to a UserTesting video, you should. Imagining how people use an app is very different than seeing it happen. (Bonus idea: UserTesting should record reactions to their videos)

3. Not testing. TDD recently had a big fallout (capped off by DHH’s talk), but the truth is that some type of formal testing needs to happen. TDD may or may not be a fit for you, but everyone can start by making a list of 10 features in their app that must work, and run through them manually.

4. Ignoring technical debt. Code quality might not make you, but it can break you. When engineers don’t have time to keep the code clean, they can’t get work done. They get frustrated. They quit. The new engineers come in and can’t understand the code, so they can’t get work done. They get frustrated. They quit. Customers aren’t being taken care of. They quit. The company dies a slow and painful death.

This is obviously just the tip of the iceberg. There are tons of ways to die in tech (perhaps even a million) but these are the problems we’ve seen most frequently.

Is there a way to die in tech that you think is glaringly obvious that we failed to list? Let us know! We are always looking to bulk up our list of things to avoid!