Whim Driven Development
-
I work as a software engineer and in my team we don’t follow any development methodologies that are out there. Let alone that, we don’t even write unit tests.We don’t have time to do all that. We don’t do any documentation whatsoever, the only resemblance of a documentation we have are the e-mails we receive at random from people asking us to make a “quick change” for them or to “deploy a fix to UAT since its a priority for some users”. No design, no test plans, no release plans and schedules...no nothing. There is barely any specification for any module of the product, so you can imagine a developer’s frustration when they want to troubleshoot an area of the system that they have no experience of. It turns out that the problem is that the company that owns us also funds our endeavour to build this product and they want their money's worth. In the past we have lost a significant amount of money due to poor quality work done by the Indian off shoring company we work with on not one but 3 occasions so obviously the board aren’t happy with us so they are driving our schedule and pushing priorities down our throats. The even more disappointing part is that there is no push back on them from anyone, no one tells them the ground reality, draws up a proper project plan, shares the release schedule with the development team so that we know what needs to go out and when and then commits to deliver. But no, skip all that, over commit to the board and then just sprint over to the developer’s desk and ask him to write code and push it out. Because pushing developers is an easy thing to do. Every one is just trying to save their own job and that’s it. To hell with code quality and craftsmanship. To hell with processes and documentation. As one of my colleague said this morning who I talked to about all this, “I just come to work to get paid, do my job get paid and go home. That’s just the way it is. If we don't do what the board asks us we are all out of a job”. I just wonder sometimes, how much longer would he or we will be able to be paid if we keep going like this. Is it not even worth my time trying to bring about a change?