What I Talk About When I Talk About I.T.

I recently read Haruki Murakami’s book ‘What I Talk About When I Talk About Running’ on the basis that it was recommended to me by a couple of people and also because I am keen, if amateur, runner. However, much as I enjoyed the book, what really grabbed me was the title: I was really set thinking about how the subjects we pick when we talk about a topic can help us to better understand our approach to it, and also help us to think about what we do well. Of course, we can also gain by considering the subjects that we don’t discuss, although it is, of course, always harder to spot things that are missing.

That said, I know that when I talk about I.T., one thing that I don’t talk about – unless asked – is code. Unless they are complete frauds, I would normally work on the assumption that anyone employed as a developer is actually able to read and write code. Furthermore, by and large a good developer can code using different languages on a given platform, as the concepts are the same: it’s just the syntax that is different. What I am saying here is that within I.T. development, the coding should be a given.

What is important is the framework around that code. So, for starters, let’s talk about the people who do the development. I’ve already said that I’m assuming these people can write code, so what makes for good developers? For a start, they need to be effective in a team environment. I cannot emphasise this enough. For example, developers need to be able to participate in a discussion about solutions and accept that, sometimes, their solution won’t be the one that is adopted, yet go away with good grace and cheer and work on the accepted solution. I have any number of anecdotes of where a developer has gone off and done it their way, regardless of what was agreed, and for this to come back and bite the entire project.

Good developers will naturally put comments in their code - describing what they are doing - because it is implicit in their mindset that, later on, someone else will come to look at it. I can clearly remember sitting once at a code handover when a developer was leaving and, in response to a question about how a function worked, could not even find the lines in his own code.

As a team player, a good developer will accept that he is part of a process, a project life-cycle, and that as he may rely on an analyst for a clear, concise specification or a project manager to effect strong change control, so there are other developers and testers who are dependent on the punctual delivery of working code. It follows from this that the developer will focus on what needs to be delivered.

At Meantime, 50% of our resource consists of developers. Around that development function, we have project management that ensures that the user requirements have been established and agreed, and that any changes to those requirements are introduced in a manner that is controlled and avoids confusion. The project manager for a piece of work will identify the resources required and plan their work accordingly. It is this discipline that enables us to deliver our clients’ requirements on time and on budget.

Business analysts spend time with the client, discussing their business and their requirements, making sure that the work has clear – and preferably demonstrable – cost benefit and also that the proposed solution is what the client wants and needs. The results of this work will result in some documentation which comes under the term of a business requirements document. For a small piece of work this may be just an email but, at the other end of the spectrum, I have just completed one that came to over seventy pages.

Once the requirements are signed off, then the business analyst then works closely with a systems analyst who will turn the business requirements into a specification for the developer. Again, the detail in the specification will vary from project to project but it should clearly set out the functionality that must be completed for the work to be considered finished.

I will write in more detail in a future blog about responsibilities for testing and with whom they lie but once the developer has completed his own testing then – for any significant piece of work – the code should go to a system tester. Their job is firstly to ensure that everything in the spec has been delivered and is working correctly and also to test various scenarios.

Once the testing is complete, the application can go to the client for them to test in a dedicated User Acceptance Test (UAT) environment. The user should be checking that everything in the business requirements document has been delivered and also that the system is intuitive and usable from their perspective.

All of the above are things that I discuss with people, mostly client, when I talk about I.T.: the importance of understanding what the user wants, sometimes when they aren’t clear themselves; the amount of work that needs to be done before a single line of code is written; the enormous value in communication with clients (all our developers talk to our clients); the importance of developers who are highly effective team players; the discreet testing function; and the handover to clients and UAT experience before code is made live.

Generally, I define the above as I.T. culture: people, processes and practice. Where I have participated in (or observed) successful projects, the culture has been positive and powerful, celebrating its own successes and understanding where it gets things right. It is a cliché but those projects have a ‘can do’ attitude. There is a prevailing team attitude that doesn’t depend on artificial glue like paint balling or getting drunk together but rather on the brilliant momentum that is gained by working together and doing a job well.

(With thanks to Haruki Murakami and Raymond Carver.)