New Challenges

"Be careful of what you wish for. You might get it".

Hard to say where that comes from, although some cite it as a misquote of Goethe. The image, of course, is from the amazing mind of Bill Watterson and his Calvin and Hobbes comic.

Regardless, that is kind of the source of why I haven't been writing much lately and why I'm starting again. I tend to write about what I'm seeing and experiencing. Which, over the last few years, has become fairly routine. After writing a good bit about my thoughts on Software Architecture, it became the task of taking my own advice.

So what changed? A chance to get what I asked for, namely a chance to go from helping insure quality in a software system to helping insure quality in a development team. The company I work for has a relatively new development team that operates fundamentally differently than our other teams. This team doesn't support a product. Instead, they handle smaller projects that have a more rigid "Definition of Done", as opposed to continued development and support of a product. This has come with more than a few challenges. Challenges that I have a pretty free hand to solve, but challenges that will take a lot of solving.

All this has put me in an interesting opportunity. Processes are getting built from the ground up. We have leave to borrow from other teams the processes we feel are helpful, as well as to ignore the things we feel won't benefit us. The end goal is increasing the rate of shipping quality software, and with very few exceptions I don't think the head of software development much cares how it happens. This gives me the freedom to take my biggest piece of advice to anyone designing software. Or, for that matter, anyone currently living and interacting with the world in any way:

“This, what is it in itself, and by itself, according to its proper constitution? What is the substance of it? What is the matter, or proper use? What is the form, or efficient cause? What is it for in this world, and how long will it abide? Thus must thou examine all things that present themselves unto thee.” --Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

In other words, "Question everything". Some ideas are worth leaving alone. Questioning the necessity of engagement between the business and development is a lot like questioning gravity. Feel free, just stay away from ledges. But how do you do these things when the business units aren't used to that engagement and don't understand the value in it. And that's not looking down on anyone- how can you know the value of something until it's been shown to you?

Beyond that, what traditional roles in Agile projects do we need? Which can we live without, and which should we live without? What do these roles mean, and how do we make sure everyone knows what an iceberg is?

What about the team? What common practices do we need? What offers us the best value in our situation. Not just what others are doing or what generally works well, but what works well for us?

These are the questions I'm asking myself and the ideas I'm exploring. I'm sure we'll go down some odd paths, and probably even the (hopefully) occasional bad path. And hopefully, my philosophy that understanding the world leads to understanding software still holds.