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A Tale of Two Software Teams
This is part four in my series on Modern Software Development Practices. In the series, I cover multiple ways in which I believe software engineers can improve their software by improving their processes and practices, all of which I have learned and lived through my time as a Software Consultant at ThoughtWorks and experiences at my current job at a large retail company in Germany.
I have been on a lot of teams. Soccer, Baseball, Wrestling, Basketball, Football, Track… I did basically every team sport.
Funny enough, it feels like I have been on almost the same amount of different Software Teams.
One thing that I noticed is the same regardless of what kind of team it was, is that while talent played a large part in the success of the team (winning in sports, quickly delivering functional bug free features in software), it was not the only thing that really mattered.
Practice mattered. But not just any practice… practice that really mattered was the practice where it did not feel like practice. Practice was always best when it felt like a real life scenario… in sports that meant practicing like it was a game, and in software that meant testing like it was production.
This leads me to the point of this article, developing and testing like it is production. I would like to illustrate this point by depicting two teams in which I have been a member of in my career so far as a Software Engineer.
Work Harder Corp — Team 1
Obviously the company name is fictional, but the team situation was as described.
We were a team that was working on an application, where multiple teams were building services that were all accessed by a single frontend application, and the services often interacted with one another.
First day on the team, I had to set up my computer to be able to develop. This included not only installing lots of dependencies which my team’s services needed, but also anything that other teams had as dependencies that way I could run the entire application locally.
It took two days to get a locally running instance … and I knew some other developers who never actually got to that point, and instead just tried to pair-program with…
