It seems that with these types of changes, I mean with more and more of the workforce working on schedules that don’t overlap, it is going to become more and more important for business software to run autonomously without anyone there to babysit it, but it seems to me we have been moving in precisely the opposite direction for some time now.Specifically “doing agile” seems to encourage this, I always see lots of supporting infrastructure being skimped on so a new feature can be delivered faster, with some hand wavy plans to fix it in some future sprint.
RamblingCTO|4 years ago
> I always see lots of supporting infrastructure being skimped on so a new feature can be delivered faster
That's bad management and has nothing to do with agile. Reserve time for bug fixes (or have fire fighting capabilities) and refactoring, include time for tech tickets. ALWAYS. Plan workload jointly with developers, talk to them regularly. It's that easy.
hatchnyc|4 years ago
Fact remains though that back when everything was waterfall (proudly) and we shipped physical media to clients, when a bug often meant flying a support engineer out to the customer’s office, software was generally delivered more completed and vetted, and the QA group wasn’t allowed to report to the same org as developers because it was considered a conflict of interest. Now some software companies don’t even have a QA organization, we are inventing new organizational and technical structures to ensure that the developers are perpetually on call to resolve issues, and there is definitely a school of thought that says delivery of a complete product is an anti-pattern because after all every feature is just an experiment that you are testing on your users. But whatever, two different times, two different needs, two different practices, and to my point now we seem to be entering a new post-COVID era where just as waterfall doesn’t scale to a continuous delivery paradigm, “you build it, you run it” as practiced today is going to struggle with an “always on” business which has no “after hours” due to more flexible working schedules.
Are there companies today that run true 24/7? Sure, plenty, but they tend to be larger and have the staff to cover this. A great deal of business software today is still very fragile operationally and has deployment, management, and maintenance tied to the 9-5, M-F business schedule. I think it is going to have to evolve.
wccrawford|4 years ago