Process — we love to hate it, but …

Process is good to protect your end customers.

When people say they don’t like the process, they don’t really mean that they don’t like the steps in the process, but rather they don’t like how these steps are streamlined.

The process should be streamlined to encourage us to launch more often and to launch smaller increments instead of making us bundle things. When it takes a long time to get things approved, the approval process could be very centralized. What microservices may improve with natural de-centralization, a centralized process may undo in terms of agility and speed.

To de-centralize the approval process, tech leaders on the floor could be ITIL certified and act as approvers; with that permission comes responsibility.

The ultimate goal would be that the same number of steps would be executed in the process, but the steps would be much quicker and streamlined in a more enjoyable fashion. The end goal is to keep the end customers satisfied and to pass all the audits.

Thank you for reading this article.

Almir Mustafic

Comments

Brand New programming language and one solution OR …

Brand New programming language and one solution OR Two existing programming languages, one solution for EACH? I understand that there is no right or wrong. It all depends on your software architecture, team structure, team skills and other factors, but I still want to explain the scenario as it may look familiar to some. Let me explain. Let’s assume that you have microservices and common libraries in two major programming languages. You have some teams who are experts in one and some teams experts in the other programming language. Now you need to come up with a solution for a scenario that all teams will need to leverage. Let’s assume that your cloud platform has an off-the-shelf approach for this but it is supported by a 3rd programming language that your teams do not have much experience in. What is the right thing for your organization and not just from the technical point of view? A) Do you embrace what your cloud platform gives you off the shelf and implement thi...

Programming / Software Engineering — Think Paper, Paper, then Code

Most of the software engineering problems are solved in what I call the high-level brainstorming sessions. We basically walk into a meeting room and white-board our thoughts and come up with solutions. When things start falling apart, you better believe this happens in the last stretch of projects and it does work. Now the issue is that we as programmers do NOT do the similar type of exercise before a line of code is written ? I typically see developers get requirements in the form of a document or a user story or in the form of walk-by requirements. The next thing I see on developers’ screens is code editors or IDEs. Is that the right thing to do? You may say that you are advanced enough and that you like to dive into coding right away, but this happens even to the best of us. We fall into this trap and rarely step back and review our habits. We have to go back to fundamentals. What did we do in school? Professors taught us to write down our thoughts and to show what...

Prototype — Turning it into Final Product quickly in order to see innovation in action !

I have a saying “There is nothing more final than a POC/Prototype”. Sadly a lot of times an unpolished prototype just becomes your production version of software. On the other hand, we have cases where prototypes fully become a throw-away work. How do we take a prototype into a final product quickly to see the fruits of your innovations with minimal effort and at the same time not have a drastic difference between the design of a prototype and the design of the final product? In other words, how do we introduce agility and flexibility? What’s on the table. You have the following in the picture regardless of the type of architecture: * Product owners and innovative ideas * Front-End development * Web-tier (server-side) development * Business logic development in some forms of web services or APIs. When you develop prototypes, you can take the Business-Logic component out of the equation most of the time and for the purposes of this article, I will not focus on that p...

Software Engineering Blogger

Search This Blog