What’s the Point?

For me, this past week was filled with meetings. I had meetings with the client, I had a demo, I had sprint planning, I had a meeting or two on our project plan. I even had a couple meetings with the purpose of helping the people who will be meeting with the client be prepared. In the end, I had about 8 hours of meetings this week. Those are the ones on my calendar. They don’t count the times I had “discussions” with anyone on my team. I spent a lot of time not in my IDE this week.

All those meetings and interactions led to very little time of dedicated development. By that, I mean there wasn’t one day that I had a good 4 hours of uninterrupted development time. Yet I was still able to release two new features this week. I started thinking about how I was able to do that. Study after study shows that switching contexts is expensive, and I can attest that is true, but I was still able to be productive and help move my project forward, not just with designs & client relations, but the product today is better than it was on Monday in part because of the software I wrote.

As I started thinking about it, I examined my motivation and what drives my software development. So my number one goal is “Does this move the project forward?”  Not “Is this a good change” but rather, is it moving the project in the right direction.  Which then lead me to think “HOW do I move the project forward?” The answer to that question was actually surprisingly easy “By completing this story that is in front of me right now.”

However, the question “HOW do I complete this story?” is a bit more complicated. Any story has a lot of possibilities for rabbit trails and diversions. When I sit down to complete this story I could just ignore everything in the project and slap something together. At the other end of the spectrum, I could take time an evaluate the entire project and figure out how make refactorings and then write my project. As is often the case, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. As I’m working on the story, I’m still asking myself the question “Is THIS moving the entire project forward?” If I can’t honestly answer that question yes with at least a 95% certainty, I don’t do it. Does that mean sometimes I don’t make changes that would be “good”? Yes, it does. But the point is for me to move the project forward.

I think some people that know me and how I write software might be shocked by me saying this. I’m a HUGE proponent of TDD (if you’ve read this blog at all, you probably already know that.) I’m also a fan of clean code and refactoring code. One friend also ribs me about the amount of joy I get out of deleting code (seriously, it’s better than writing code!)

So how can I be such a huge proponent of these aspects of software development that are often viewed as rearranging deck chairs, and at the same time talk about the number one goal of any software development needs to be “to move the project forward?” Simple. I do TDD, refactoring, clean code etc because those help me move the project forward as fast as possible.

There’s a lot of things we can do as software developers. There’s all sorts of practices and patterns that we can implement. But at the end of the day, the customer doesn’t care about the repository pattern, or observer pattern. Often times, they won’t even understand what that is, nor should they. What the customer does care about is a quality working application.

So for me, the point of software development is to deliver a working application. If in the midst of development I’m doing something that does not meet that goal, I stop.