I’ve been doing professional software development for nearly 10 years now. Throughout that time, I’ve worked at a number of organizations, I’ve been managed by a number of different people, and I’ve attempted to absorb as much knowledge (both technical and non-technical) as possible. After that long of a time, I’ve come to realize a bit about what makes me who I am, and what drives me as a person and developer.
I like to call these My Core Values. These core values are as follows:
- Delivery
- Quality
- Communication
Delivery
First and foremost, as a software developer, if the code you are writing isn't going live, then you might as well not be doing it. However, this core value goes beyond just "getting code live," as it also pertains to the manner and standard of the work you're delivering.
Operational Excellence
The actual go-live process must be of the highest quality. My indicators for excellence are as follows:
- Deployments are not scary. No one should have a pit in their stomach when a deployment is happening.
- Deployment process is published and well-known. Anyone should be able to able to run a deployment.
- Deployments are repeatable (idempotent).
- Rollbacks are straightforward. I hate rolling a deployment back, but if it needs to happen, a rollback should be as simple as a deployment.
- Team at large is aware of every deployment. Communication is key here. Tracking application metrics post-deployment matters, as well.
Delivered Value Matters
This one sounds weird (and its a work in progress), but the core of this value is that getting something live sooner is better than getting nothing live for a long time.
For example, let's assume you're working on a project for a client, and you estimate that it won't be finished for 9 months. Nine months is a hard sell to any client for them to see delivered value (code that went live), so getting some percentage live sooner (40% of the project in 2 months, for example) will bring more satisfaction to the client.
Quality
If the work you are outputting is low-quality, then it doesn't matter that it went live. If no one can use the product you made, it's not done yet. With respect to quality, I directly care about two main traits, detailed below.
Code Quality
A software developer's primary output is code. Regardless of functional or non-functional specifications, the product from a software developer is the code. Due to this, the quality of the code must be of the highest degree. To achieve this, I focus on two specific traits:
- Code reviews are paramount to a team's learning and improvement. Code reviews are open, honest, and non-personal. Everyone is invited, and anyone can participate.
- Developers are the primary responsible party for a delivered item's quality. This means that if code is rejected in the final stage of QA, the developer that wrote the code owns the defect.
Both of these points will have future posts dedicated to them, so stay tuned!
Quality Assurance
While developers are inherently bad testers due to the fact that they understand the underpinnings of the code they wrote, it stills falls on the developer to do some semblance of quality checks.
- Developers test code they checked in. This is typically done by walking through the acceptance criteria locally to ensure all the points are hit.
- Developers do not punt tasks over the wall. It's never "not my job" when a different team needs help with a task. Developers have a seat at the table with every issue/feature, so they should be an active participant to work through any potential situations.
Communication
This is the hardest value to learn and improve upon. As developers, most of us want to put hands-on-keyboard as much as possible, ignoring the world around us. While this is the most efficient use of our time if we're all individual contributors, that's rarely the case in a team or organization.
Work Visibility
The easiest way for an organization at-large to understand what the software development team is working on is to make it visible in an easy-to-understand manner.
- All work done by the development team is visible to all team members. This allows for natural cross-talk between developers regarding the work being done.
- The current state of the development team is easily determined. This is typically done with a board in a tool like JIRA or Trello.
Honesty
There must be a social contract both within the software development team and between the software development team and the external business teams.
- Work statuses are communicated clearly and honestly. This is typically done in a daily stand-up meeting (more on these later). If something isn't going perfectly to plan, be upfront about it to figure out the solution earlier rather than later.
- Reasons for work priorities are clearly communicated to all team members. If there's an angry client that requires Feature X to do business, let the team know this. A developer works best when she knows why she is working on something, rather than just doing it to get a paycheck.
- Development leadership communicates good, bad, and ugly to all team members. Things don't always go well; it is imperative that the development team is aware of the data that the business team is aware of. Additionally, let the software development team know when situations are good!
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