There comes a time in every developer’s life (or daily routine, we’re not here to judge) where they have to go and fix a bug. Back in the days when I used to be a developer, I distinctly remember how each time I would go face to face with a bug, my favorite method to fix it was to add log lines. I mean, why not, right?
As engineers, we continuously aim for perfection. The drive to deliver the perfect product sometimes defines how good we are as engineers. We often discuss and fine tune the term and the essence of our product’s perfection. Some claim that a perfect product is one that handles all the edge cases, works flawlessly, and can do everything.
As most developers know, their code doesn’t always behave as they expect it to and they’re not quite sure why. This is most apparent when it comes to debugging their software. In order to figure out what the problem is, developer teams must go through a very long process in order to get the data they need to understand the problem. This can involve unnecessary wait times, unproductive hours, and a lot of wasted resources.
Modern developers are under ever increasing pressure to deliver software applications to the business in record time. This means shorter development cycles and a push to have code production ready as early as possible. In addition, many development teams no longer throw the code over the metaphorical wall to be handled by operations and production support teams, but rather oftentimes own the entire end to end delivery chain.
They say that procrastination is the thief of time. In the world of software development, there are some additional “time thieves” that prevent our teams from developing new features or slow them down as they attempt to fix issues. As software engineers or R&D managers, we take it for granted that our teams spend a lot of their time waiting for compiling, testing, and deploying.
Develop fast, release, learn, repeat. That’s essentially the (not-so-secret) innovation formula, right? Most of us spend our time enhancing the products we have already released. We want to be innovative, releasing new features with the velocity of an unencumbered startup. Yet, we also have customers with quality expectations we need to meet. Guidance on shortening release cycles often centers on adopting agile (or similar) development methodologies. But most companies are already there.
Over the recent years, software development organizations have seen a major shift in where they build and run their applications. Teams have transitioned from building applications that run exclusively on-prem to microservices applications that are built to run natively in the cloud. This shift gives businesses more flexibility as well as quick and easy access to enterprise services without the need to host costly applications and infrastructure.
Looking at modern software development practices, most of them aim at maximizing the output of your team and the quality of your software. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 20 years you know of the agile development methodology and you’ve probably heard about the lean methodology. Both of these methodologies can be differentiated by a few factors, but they are pretty similar - they aim at delivering fast and to the point.
As the world keeps spinning and technology keeps progressing ever-further, a lot of focus is being put on optimizing productivity. However, there is an aspect that is being overlooked: adaptivity. Being adaptive as an organization has become critical. It’s not just about your organization, but about helping your clients to be fluent and adaptive as well. In our experience, this means helping the user to get the best experience possible.
Previously in our hypergrowth series, we spoke about the business and cultural aspects of hypergrowth. We highlighted guidelines such as focusing on sales enablement and empowering your employees as a means to ensure that your company culture can be sustained as your business grows by 40% year over year.
