No one has ever, ever shipped a piece of software and thanked the process. Apologies to everyone that work with methodologies and ALM, but it’s true.
Why?
Because, processes don’t ship software, people do. Do a mental back-check of the last few releases to see what really got them out the door? Was it the check-in process, how bugs were logged or what happened at the last triage meeting? Probably not. No one ever ships a release and goes – “Thank the heavens we have this process because otherwise we would never have been able to go out the door”. No, it always goes something like this – “Thanks everyone for all your hard work and dedication that enabled us to ship this release out to our customers”… or something to that ilk.
This isn’t to say that it has to be the wild west; requirements, design, development, deployment – all huge important steps of a release – but the people are what make it happen. So if the people are what make it happen, don’t constrain them in what they do, empower them, really, really empower them – “show me what you’ve got, here’s the ball run”. I’ve always been a huge proponent of finding the best people – you get the best people in a room and they can AND will build and ship anything – you have a mediocre team and you’re going to be making excuses based on your chosen process or methodology – you’ll see the excuses start to rise – “well we were supposed to log it this way” or “well we didn’t clear this gate when test 5 of 2000 failed” and those types of comments are red flags.
And if you don’t believe me, at the end of the day when the chips are down, tell me who you’re going to call? The process and say – “Hey, servers just went offline” – (although could be quite humorous) – no what you’re going to do is “Hey, Dave servers are…” – “Yeah man I see what’s going on, I’m already looking into it”.
And you can’t build a process for that – that is having a great team and that is what ships software.
