Fog of Development
The term “Fog of war” refers to the uncertainty participants in military operations experience. It slows the achievement of goals and causes resources to be inefficiently utilized.
The “Fog of Development” is when development teams don’t have the information they need at their fingertips. The more the team doesn’t have easy access to key data, the more productivity and responsiveness is degraded.
The kinds of information developers need to have immediate access to are fairly mundane, but can make a huge difference in daily tempo:
- Where is the latest source code?
- What development tools do I need?
- What version did we ship to this particular customer?
- What’s the build process?
- Where should I make the change I’m supposed to make?
- What’s the deployment process?
- What operational environments do we have (QA, Staging, Production)?
- What does the production environment look like?
- What features are being actively developed?
- What’s everyone’s status?
Without these, it’s very difficult to keep everyone engaged. Most developers want to be creative and productive, wrestling with as little minutiae as possible. Not having key information just makes getting things done painful.
It’s the development manager’s responsibility to make sure important information is accurate and readily available to all members of the team. This can be achieved in several ways. Some are:
- Put up a live wiki-like site that all developers have access to (and can modify).
- Regular stand up meetings to communicate status and raise issues (Agile/Scrum).
- Encourage team members to keep information stores updated.
Building and delivering value through software is hard enough. Help out your teams by making sure they have the information they need to do the job well.
Thoughts? Further Tips? Leave a comment!