The Most Powerful Software Development Process Is The Easiest • Dave Farley • GOTO 2024

[@gus-199]

Engineering teams often have the desire to work close to this ideal situation. The biggest barrier they face usually isn't technical, but bureaucratic and of resources. A lot of companies don't want to invest in improving their engineering, and simply want to pump out features as fast as possible in the short term, without understanding this actually cripples their abilities to deliver in the long term. The relationship between management and engineering often resembles an abusive one, where one partner bends themselves backwards to provide for the other, at the cost of their own well being.

[@RFalhar]

I dissagree. My experiences are that many inneficiencies in team-based software development process are inflicted by the developers themselves. When you ask a developer what "ideal" process from their perspective is, it would be something like 1. Get exact and detailed specification of desired functionality. 2. Dissapear for few days and crank out some code that fullfills the specification. 3. Throw the code over to code review, hoping that the reviewer glosses over the changes and approves it without any comments. 4. Merges into trunk 5. Is glad the work is finished and moves on to next task. No mention of collaboration. No mention of exploration. No mention of assessing how the software runs in production. No mention of testing. 80%+ developers I've met fit into this category. And processes that teams made from these developers are often the most inneficient and burnout-inducing I've worked in.

[@gus-199]

@@RFalhar you see, what you mentioned is the direct result of bad technical leadership, which is a reflection of... you guessed it, not wanting to invest in hiring people who actually understand what they are doing. There are lots of hardworking, competent software engineers out there. But if you put inexperienced people on a project without guidance and with high turnover, the problems you mentioned are what you get.

[@gus-199]

Hire more seniors (not necessarily years but skill level), and don't gaslight the juniors into assuming senior-level responsibilities just because "there's not enough budget" to hire better qualified people to guide them That's what happened in one of the companies I left, and the results were disastrous. Two year project nowhere near stable enough to deploy to production

[@Tony-dp1rl]

All reasonable ideas, but hardly anyone uses these techniques. And more importantly, almost none of the top software in any field does. In most industries, the cost/benefit comes out too high to use continuous deployment. It would be nice to see real world examples of it working well? So far on his channel I have seen bad examples, like Tesla and Sea of Thieves (only partly CI/CD), and nobody really wants the quality of either of those companies in production. Are there any real-world examples to be had???????

[@chris.dillon]

Do you code these days? Do you have a github profile page? Do you ever have to build tools while consulting? Are you so senior that you don’t fit the hands on role anymore, sort of like Will Larson’s Staff Engineer book predicts?