Too often, organizations reduce the technical aspect of software development to coding and delivering features.
This, however, betrays a company which hasn't understood digital work yet, and it begs the question who, if anyone, is taking care of:
 |
| Technology is the pillar of software development that might be hidden in plain sight |
Engineering
Are you engineering your software properly, or just churning out code? Are you looking only at the bit of work to be done, or how it fits into the bigger picture? Do you apply scientific principles for the discovery of smart, effective and efficient solutions? How do you ensure that your solutions aren't just makeshift, but will withstand the test of time?
Automation
What do you turn into code? Only the requirement, or also things that will help you do your work easier, with higher quality, and lower chance of failure? Do you invest into improving the automation of your quality assurance, build processes, your deployment pipeline, your configuration management - even your IDE? How many things that a machine could do is your company still doing by hand, and how much does that cost you over the year - including all of those "oops" moments?
Monitoring
Once you delivered something - how do you know that it works, it works correctly, is being used, is being used correctly, has no side effects, and is as valuable as you think it was? Do you make telemetry a standard of your applications, or do you have reasons for remaining ignorant about how your software performs in the real world?
All of the items above cost time and require skills. Are you planning sufficient capacity to do these things in your work, or are you accumulating technical debt at a meta level?
Think for a minute: How well does your team balance technological needs and opportunities with product and organizational requirements?
No comments:
Post a Comment