There are lots of problems that prevent businesses from responding to market trends as quickly as they’d like. Many are not IT related, some are. I’d like to discuss a few problems that I see over and over again, and maybe present some useful solutions. As you read this, please remember that there are always exceptions. But deciding that you have one of these exceptional circumstances is always easier when starting from a sensible basic idea.
Business focused targeting.
For many kinds of work, quicker is better. For software development, quicker is better. But working faster isn’t the same thing as delivering faster.
I remember working as technical lead for a price comparison site in the UK, where once a week each department would read out a list of the things they achieved in the last week and how that had benefited the business. For many parts of the business there was a nice and easy line that could be drawn from what they did each week and a statistic of growth (even if some seemed quite contrived). But the development team was still quite inexperienced, and struggling to do CI never mind CD. For the less experienced devs, being told to “produce things quicker” had the opposite effect. Traditional stick and carrot doesn’t have the same impact on software development as on other functions, because a lot of the time what speeds up delivery seems counter intuitive.
- Have two people working on each task (pair programming)
- Focus on only one feature at a time
- Write as much (or more) test code as functional code
- Spend time discussing terminology and agreeing a ubiquitous language
- Decouple from other systems
- Build automated delivery pipelines
These are just a few examples of things which can be pushed out because someone wants the dev team to work faster. But in reality, having these things present is what enables a dev team to work faster.
Development teams feel a lot of pressure to deliver, because they know how good they can be. They know how quickly software can be written, but it takes mature development practices to deliver quickly and maintain quality. Without the required automation, delivering quick will almost always mean a reduction in quality and more time taken fixing bugs. Then there are the bugs created while fixing other bugs, and so on. Never mind the huge architectural spirals because not enough thought went into things at the start. In the world of software, slow and steady may lose the first round, but it sets the rest of the race up for a sure win.
Tightly coupling systems.
I can’t count how often I’ve heard someone say “We made a tactical decision to tightly couple with <insert some system>, because it will save us money in the long run.”
No.
Just no.
Please stop thinking this.
Is it impossible for highly coupled systems to be beneficial? No. Is yours one of these cases? Probably not.
There are so many hidden expenses incurred due to tightly coupled designs that it almost never makes any sense. The target system is quite often the one thing everything ends up being coupled with, because it’s probably the least flexible ‘off the shelf’ dinosaur which was sold to the business without any technical review. There are probably not many choices for how to work with it. Well the bottom line is: find a way, or get rid. Ending up with dozens of applications all tightly bound to one central monster app. Changes become a nightmare of breaking everyone else’s code. Deployments take entire weekends. License fees for the dinosaur go through the roof. Vendor lock in turns into shackles and chains. Reality breaks down. Time reverses, and mullets become cool.
Maybe I exaggerated with the mullets.
Once you start down this path, you will gradually lose whatever technical individuals you have who really ‘get’ software delivery. The people who could make a real difference to your business will gradually go somewhere their skills can make a difference. New features will not only cost you more to implement but they’ll come with added risk to other systems.
If you are building two services which have highly related functionality, ie. they’re in the same sub-domain (from a DDD perspective), then you might decide that they should be aware of each other on a conceptual level, and have some logic which spans both services and depends on both being ‘up’, and which get versioned together. This might be acceptable and might not lead to war or famine, but I’m making no promises.
It’s too hard to implement Dev Ops.
No, it isn’t.
Yes, you need at least someone who understands how to do it, but moving to a Dev Ops approach doesn’t mean implementing it across the board right away. That would be an obscene way forwards. Start with the next thing you need to build. Make it deployable, make it testable with integration tests written by the developer. Work out how to transform the configuration for different environments. Get it into production. Look at how you did it, decide what you can do better. Do it better with the next thing. Update the first thing. Learn why people use each different type of technology, and whether it’s relevant for you.
Also, it’s never too early to do Dev Ops. If you are building one ‘thing’ then it will be easier to work with if you are doing Dev Ops. If you have the full stack defined in a CI/CD pipeline and you can get all your changes tested in pre-production environments (even infra changes) then you’re winning from the start. Changes become easy.
If you have a development team who don’t want to do Dev Ops then you have a bigger problem. It’s likely that they aren’t the people who are going to make your business succeed.
Ops do routing, DBA’s do databases.
Your developers should be building the entire stack. They should be building the deployment pipeline for the entire stack. During deployment, the pipeline should configure DNS, update routing tables, configure firewalls, apply WAF rules, deploy EC2 instances, install the built application, run database migration scripts, and run tests end to end to make sure the whole lot is done correctly. Anything other than this is just throwing a problem over the fence to someone else.
The joke of the matter is that the people doing the developer’s ‘dirty work’ think this is how they support the business. When in reality, this is how they allow developers to build software that can never work in a deployed state. This is why software breaks when it gets moved to a different environment.
Ops, DBA’s, and other technology specialists should be responsible for defining the overall patterns which get implemented, and the standards which must be met. The actual work should be done by the developer. If for no other reason than the fact that when the developer needs a SQL script writing, there will never be a DBA available. The same goes for any out-of-team dependencies – they’re never available. This is one of the biggest blockers to progress in software development: waiting for other people to do their bit. It’s another form of tight coupling, building inter-dependent teams. It’s a people anti-pattern.
If you developers need help to get their heads around routing principals or database indexing, then get them in a room with your experts. Don’t get those people to do the dirty work for everyone else, that won’t scale.
BAU handle defects.
A defect found by a customer should go straight back to the team which built the software. If that team is no longer there, then whichever team was ‘given’ responsibility for that piece of software gets to fix the bug.
Development teams will go a long way to give themselves an easy life. That includes adding enough error handling, logging, and resilient design practices to make bug fixing a cinch, but only if they’re the ones who have to deal with the bugs.
Fundamental design flaws won’t get fixed unless they’re blocking the development team.
Everything else.
This isn’t an exhaustive list. Even now there are more and more things springing to mind, but if I tried to shout every one out then I’d have a book, not a blog post. The really unfortunate truth is that 90% of the time I see incredibly intelligent people at the development level being ignored by the business, by architects, even by each other, because even though a person hears someone saying ‘this is a good/bad idea’ being able to see past their own preconceptions to understand that point of view is often incredibly difficult. Technologists all too often lack the soft skills required to make themselves heard and understood. It’s up to those who have made a career from their ‘soft skills’ to recognise that and pay extra attention. A drowning person won’t usually thrash about and make a noise.
Coding Daddy Dobbs 