Development

Developer

• Should love to learn new technologies. As tech grows up fast. So it is essential to keep up to date and to stay close to new trends.
• Should open to new ideas, embrace the changes and enjoy challenges. As we are a standup and we are trying to solve the new problem most of the time, be ready for it. Especially for frontend, it is messier than back-end because every user behaves differently.
• Could think a problem in a bigger picture and could also break the goal down into manageable steps. So it is quicker to get started but also have the code flexible and scalable.
• Love coding and is a self-motivated and self-disciplined person who could fill the blank ticket himself and take pride in the work.
• Should be peaceful about some of process, as in the company, we have code review culture. Make sure the code have a good test coverage in the first place and don't mind to have the code tested by PR reviewer and do not take it personally.
• Should be a good team player who enjoy to work together with others. not only the developers, but could also build strong relationships with product, design etc. Communicate if there is any problem

Development Workflow

For most teams, software development looks like this:

The product manager, along with customer-facing teams, spends time talking to existing customers and potential customers to understand about the market.

Depending on the business needs and customer requirements derived from the previous step, the product manager prioritizes features the team needs to focus on.

Using the information gathered, the prioritized features are spec’d with User Stories, Tasks, and Enhancements.

These actionable items are then shared with a cross-functional team to estimate, further prioritize, and then tracked using either Scrum or a Kanban to ship the feature within a deadline.

However, a software development workflow isn’t about moving cards from one column to another. It’s all the invisible flow of information too!

The 3 causes for a broken software development workflow

1. Laser focussed on a specific task: Sure, that’s important. But software development isn’t just about checking off tasks.After all, the best developers are the ones who can focus on the fine implementation details while still having a picture of the broader purposes of the feature as a whole.

By being laser focussed on just the tasks assigned to themselves, development teams miss the forest for the trees.

Solution: Think big, start small. Once the top priority features are prioritized, the product manager jumps in to drill into the specifics of all the functionalities of the feature by writing detailed user stories, tasks, and enhancements. And how each functionality should behave by writing detailed acceptance criteria as descriptions.

This view makes it easy for the product manager to plan features. And gives them (and anyone who’s collaborated later on) a neat document-like view of what the feature is really about.

2. Greater emphasis on the process than productivity: While processes are great, we must understand they’re put in place to help your team stay productive and produce a desirable outcome. A mistake many teams make is overemphasizing teams to follow a process when it isn’t helping.

A good example of this can be seen when teams implement agile processes by the book in the hope of making their team agile. It’s important to keep in mind that processes need to be built with people in mind. And not with rules.

What good is a process if it hinders your team from being nimble and moving fast anyway?

Solution: Eliminate ambiguity by creating alignment.

Delivering quality features at every interaction requires alignment from multiple teams and it shouldn’t be a passive process.

Everything starts with bringing everyone up to speed on the priorities

This gives every single member a complete picture of what our priorities are, even when things change due to unforeseen circumstances.

3. Building complex, rigid workflows to get updates at every step: Workflows are simple when a team is small. As teams grow, the first thing that gets introduced is complexity. Developers and designers work in silos, without any awareness of what the other team was working on.

As each phase of the software development occurs in different tools and key pieces of information is lost when teams handoff.

To keep the development workflow in motion, you need a seamless hand-over between teams. And this needs to happen while each of them focuses on the task at hand without losing sight of the big picture.

Solution: Add a board for each team, which allows designers to move a user story from Design board to Dev board’s Todo column once the designer has the final version of the design ready.

An improved development workflow

The development workflow when building software needs to allow teams to achieve three things:

1. Get visibility at a specific task and the broader picture.
2. Reduce complexity by not having to set up configurations and stitched processes.
3. Reduce tools to streamline the process, so team members don’t have to be clueless about where to look for the most recent information.