When a whole team has too much to do and they make the mistake of bypassing quality to keep the delivery schedule, they get caught in the Vicious Circle of Busyness. The team members see themselves as not having enough time, when in fact they have too much to do. There's a big difference. You can't create more time, but you can decide to finish less. As long as time is your problem, you're focusing on the wrong problem.
At first, just one team member produces rework-requiring code, his load becomes too much and the other team members pitch in. It is a good sign in a team that people help each other. But the power of busyness can be overwhelming if the team isn't equipped with a strong sense of quality-awareness and the right kinds of skills to produce good quality software. The Vicious Circle of Busyness is contagious.

The first-to-fall (the first to bypass quality) receives too much negative feedback to handle himself, his colleagues take over some of his planned tasks and being overloaded succumb to the call of busyness. They skip the scheduled code reviews as they are falling behind. Another victim falls into the Vicious Circle of Busyness, and soon another, and another. Before long, the whole team is affected. Because of their hasty decisions, their already tight schedule is filled with unplanned rework in addition to the original tasks. The harder they work, the more they produce, the less time they have, the more they need to work. That's the trap, and the team sees the only logical conclusion. They decide to produce less.

They can't lower the output too much or their manager would surely notice, but they need to do something. Decreasing the workload lowers the amount of negative feedback flowing into the team giving the team more time to work on the fewer features. They innovate only in ways to produce less without anybody noticing. In a sense, they go into hiding. They need to produce enough so their boss is not too unhappy, but not so much that they themselves are unhappy. Even the customer is less unhappy about the situation, but the important thing to notice here is that none of players are actually happy.

The team becomes a dull place where creativity and innovation are unknown. All the focus is on keeping the negative feedback at bay. The team has lost any ambitions they might have had in the past. They have no illusions of their place in the organization. They are there to fix their own errors, nothing else. Their inability to get out of the Vicious Circle of Busyness has driven them completely lifeless. The team spirit is broken. At the first opportunity, people start jumping ship and the team slowly disbands. All this because they went for schedule over quality.

The Vicious Circle of Busyness is an important concept in Chapter 3. "Root Causes". In this excerpt, we look at it with from team perspective. Individuals and whole organizations get caught up in the circle. The situation isn't as hopeless as it sounds. If your team is held hostage by the Vicious Circle of Busyness, i.e. you all have been ignoring quality in order to save time, Tick-the-Code can help you.