| I liked the article, it is really in depth. Thing is I am taking the opposite approach because author has different goals. Author gets to be VP of engineering on company that has multiple product teams and he gets to sit at "the table". I am engineering lead for a company that has one dev team, I can give my opinions and run stuff however I want but I don't get a sit at the table. The way I see it if I would like to take authors approach I would be like Scotty trying to go over commanders head - going with the analogy as software engineer I run the ship I am not making decision or being responsible about where the ship goes. So my approach is that I minimize responsibility of the engineering team and I use scrum to do so. We are accountable for running the ship on time, every sprint gets delivered, every release is delivered like a clockwork. Business gets their input and output - if they have clear requirements that are small enough for the sprint going in, they will get change on production after 6 to 8 weeks. We cannot promise something will be there in 6 months or a year, we can work on figuring out requirements with business and find out what we can promise to be there in 8 weeks on production. We guard the process so we have predictable schedule on finished tasks and releases - what is finished or almost finished goes to the release candidate and we promise RC will be in 2 weeks on production and most of the time it works. Yes we can do an emergency bypass and get someone to work on something ASAP - but it really has to be important, not something "a person" thinks is important. Prediction is state A of the application + 2 weeks that is fully possible for reasonably well written requirements. If someone wants to hold me accountable for their grand vision I say no, he has to deliver requirements that I can help him with - so just developers should not let themselves to be pushed around to be responsible for more than they actually should. Just like captain in Star Trek has no say about how the ship has to be run I don’t want business guys coming over and making me do stuff their way. |