Are you “risk adverse” or just “improvement adverse”?

It is my firm belief that you can be risk averse while constantly improving.  I worked with someone a long time ago who said that they were “risk averse”.  What this meant is they didn’t like the way that I would refactor code I had to maintain (after I put it under automated tests).  They pushed back on my suggestions to improve deploy times because it would require changing things that “already worked”.   These deploy times were taking up to thirty minutes and sometimes occurred multiple times a day.  That got me thinking, “are you risk averse, or are you improvement averse?” Continue reading