Some thoughts, ideas and fun!!!

When doing development we always underestimate the environment we work in.  What I mean by this is that we don’t want to think of how we’re going to release a product, how the testing will be done and on which platforms and we definitely don’t like to think that someone out there, usually called the “stakeholder”, would be interested to see on a daily basis the progress we’re making on the product/system they pay us to do…  Now if you take all this into consideration and you really analyze this for yourself and make a list of all those pesky things Management always make you do, which are not development related then you soon realize that they’re almost all the same things over and over and over again.  Now, if you sat down for a few seconds and really thought how you would like to remove those pesky things that they want and strictly speaking need you to do, like have a site where they can play on the product that you’re working on, or they would like to get daily (some cases even hourly) updates and they would really like to see whether the quality of the product that you’re working on is worth the money they’re spending on you and everything that comes with you, then isn’t it time that we as developers start doing something about it…  I mean there are so many resources and products out there that enable us to remove those things.  Even though these products are out there we still continue in the way we usually do…  WHY???  Could it be laziness? I don’t think so, because doing those pesky things are simply more work…  Is it that we like those pesky things?  Again I don’t think so.  Is it because we don’t have time to do it? NOPE!!! Try again…  Personally I think that it’s simply because we’re not empowered to do it and we would rather sit and play with something more cool than say setting up a Hudson server to have our nightly builds released to that “special” environment where Management and stakeholders can play.

I’ve just completed writing another article on this site where you can see how easy it is to set up an environment and will continue writing about how to continue with this process of eliminating all those pesky Management things that we, as Techies, don’t like doing and definitely don’t want to continue doing going forward… The set of articles can be found under Environments and I really hope that we start enabling ourselves to do more of these things, because I know for a fact that there are a lot of other companies out there that still don’t have these basic things in place and at the same time it’s really not a new concept…