Having a Way of Working

[swatts]

Hello Lovelies,

As I was beginning to think about the organisation of the User Group Track at NIDays London in November and I got the news that we would now have to pay £250 to attend. Well that's saved me some work then.....................

This here article is just a summary of the points we were trying to get across in our NIWeek 2017 presentation that you can see below.

The goal of the presentation was stated thusly

To try and encourage software teams to have a “way”, and to base this way on good clinical decision making.

I can only really draw on my own experiences so we give a load of examples on how we do stuff at SSDC.

We discussed Project Management, Issue Tracking, Version Management and Document Management. But we could only employ some of the short cuts shown because we have a way of working. By "Way of Working" I mean that the 4 software engineers in SSDC all work the same way, we have a common methodology and a common process and we refine these as we go.

This way may not be the best way, but 4 people working together will always beat 4 geniuses working individually.

One aspect wasn't really covered in the slide set and that is the human part of this. How do you get it to work. For us we issue track everything including our processes, templates, tools and documents. We are also very democratic, I tend to lead the discussion but as grumpy old men the others tend to brutally shoot down anything that doesn't make sense. Describing the "why" of a thing is also a necessity. As an example.

If you cannot describe why something should be done, perhaps it shouldn't be done.

If you have any questions on the presentation stick them in the comments.

Lots of Love

Steve 

[joerg.hampel]

I enjoyed the presentation very much, also Jon's part.

But shouldn't it read "If you can't describe why something should be done, perhaps it shouldn't be done" in the last paragraph?

[swatts]

Thanks matey, kind of you. 

And yes you are right, will update now. Writing didn't come easy today, funny how that works.

[FabiolaDelaCueva]

Steve,

A great article as usual, my favorite part:

"This way may not be the best way, but 4 people working together will always beat 4 geniuses working individually."

This is one of the things we help our customers figure out first. We start by showing them the Delacor way and use that as a springboard, but that doesn't mean that is the best way for them. Every team is different and if they do not buy into a new process, it doesn't matter how good we think the process is, it will not work!

Thanks for sharing,

Fab

[swatts]

Thanks Fab,

That one has been rattling round my brain for a little while now. I think the key to good process management is "buy-in". I also believe that discipline helps creativity, I want SSDC to be creative on a customer solution and not with internal stuff.

I have more thoughts on discipline and choice that I'll convert into an article at some point in the future.

Stay Dry!

Steve

[FabiolaDelaCueva]

"I want SSDC to be creative on a customer solution and not with internal stuff"

This is why I like project templates and scripting tools. I want developers to be creative with solving the problem, no need to apply creativity to problems we have already solved: error handling, launching a module, stopping a module, etc.

Sun is out in Austin! keeping dry and thinking of all our family and friends in Houston and the Texas coast.