Practices

I’ve written previously about my thoughts on team structure. I’m a fan of product-centric teams – multidisciplinary teams that embed members from functional groups on the same team, all working together to create and ship a software product.

Providing a great user experience under a variety of performance situations means designing for a variety of expectations. Defining a great user experience should include performance budgets for the various pieces of the experience. Some basic examples include: Application startup, Image loading, and UI responsiveness.

You work in an organization that sets some high-level goals. Your team might be accountable for some of those goals. However, to hit the goals, you’ll need cooperation from groups outside of your team.

I’ve used messaging tools like IRC and Slack at work every day for the last 11+ years. For much of that time, I was working remotely. Even my co-workers, working in offices, used messaging tools as much as I did.

Normal releases are consistent and predictable. Scheduled releases benefit developers, testers, support and PR. Unpredictable releases can cause communication problems, stress and fatigue. Those can lead to poor software quality and developer turn-over.

We all want to ship as fast as possible, while making sure we can control the quality of our product. Continuous deployment means we can ship at any time, right? Well, we still need to balance the unstable and stable parts of the codebase.