A Developer's Birthday Wish List
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Join For FreeLast week was my birthday! Yay! As a developer, here's what I want for developers:
- I want developers to be empowered to do whatever they need to do to satisfy the real business needs and delight their customers.
- I want developers to be accountable for the decisions they make, and not by decisions that are made for them.
- I don't want to see developers going through endless meetings trying
to prove why they shouldn't use the technologies or architecture
defined by an ivory tower architect. In fact, ivory-tower architects
should be an extinct species (visit your nearest National History Museum
if you want to see one).
- I want developers to know the truth. If a decision was made because
of political reasons, please tell us that that is the case. We will
still be unhappy but at least we will find it easier to digest.
- Although we are happy to justify and explain every technical
decision we, the development team, make, we don't want to have any
person that is not part of the development team making technical
decisions.
- I don't want to see developers working with technical people
that think that their role is to define the architecture of a project. I
want developers to work with people that focus on delivering the
simplest solution to a problem; satisfying functional and non-functional
requirements. If we can achieve that without writing software, even
better. And no, that doesn't mean quick and dirty.
- In case we need to write software to solve a business problem, I
want developers to craft solutions in a way that changes are embraced
and the business will never be slowed down by technical incompetence.
- I want developers that can build applications that will provide a
good return on investment to the business. I don't want to see
applications being decommissioned after a few years because they became a
pile of crap; the maintenance cost is so high that it is cheaper to
rewrite.
- I want to work with developers that are passionate and care about
what they do. Every single day I want to speak to my colleagues and
learn something new from them, the same way they should learn something
new from me.
- I want to work with people (not just developers) that embrace
changes and provide business agility. I don't want to keep embarrassing
myself every time I need to tell stakeholders that the small change they
want will take a few months to be done (due to the crap
application/architecture/process we have).
- I want to work in a place where we can choose the best technology or
tool for the job; without being told that we cannot do that because our
people don't have the skills. "They need to be trained." (sigh)
- Instead of being told that we need to build a new feature or even an
entire new application using specific technologies, we would appreciate
if we were just given the business requirements. I would love to see
that developers are trusted to provide the best solution for the
problem.
- I would like to see the people behind all the bureaucracy and stupid processes being blamed by the damage they are causing.
- I would like to see all the 9-to-5 employees being replaced by just a
few passionate, talented, well-paid and empowered professionals.
- I wish all companies recognised software development as a full
career and not as just the initial steps for management. Yes, this is
stupid.
- I wish that every organisation paying for a software project understood the principles of Software Craftsmanship and the importance to have real software craftsmen working on their projects.
You may be thinking that I'm not being reasonable. No one will be able to give me all
the things I want as a birthday present. You are right. I agree.
And because of that, I won't add all the many other wishes I have to
the list above. I could go on forever.
The good news for me is that I'm really smart and I always have a plan
B. Although I'm a disappointed that I won't get all these things for my
birthday this year, my plan is to be a good boy for the rest of the year
and maybe Santa will bring me some of these for Xmas.
Software development
Published at DZone with permission of Sandro Mancuso, DZone MVB. See the original article here.
Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.
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