(Original creator: bolarotibi)
Part 2 (The threat of the Start-up and how traditional development teams can look to fight back)
Appreciate the skills, knowledge and assets that you have
Once an organisation, however large, adopts a culture in which the development and IT teams believe that things can be done quickly but still within high standards of quality and compliance, then they can compete against their smaller challengers. This cultural shift can be difficult with often resistance coming from those entrenched in the old ways. Some may fear that the new processes will make them redundant. This is why organisations have to tailor new processes to their strengths and considerations such as governance have to be taken into account. For example, when moving to Agile it is important not to be too fanatical about a certain methodology such as Scrum. The best Agile environments are those where the approach is tweaked to suit the organisation’s skills, needs and concerns. A start-up does not have to worry about large legacy investments with years of domain knowledge built around them. An enterprise most likely will and so that knowledge (people) needs to be retained. Equally some projects may still require a more Waterfall style approach due to the nature and scale of the systems involved. Enterprises therefore need new processes that embody Agile execution practices, but they must be sensible and balanced in their application.
Don’t forget operations
Agile will help developers add new features more quickly but it is only part of the overall process. Moving to CI and CD processes will create a development and operations environment that allows reliable and stable software to be released quickly. Embracing the concept of DevOps (the removal of artificial barriers between operations and development teams and finding a new working relationship that benefits the entire software process) will reduce the friction between the development and operations teams and so help to get new releases into production more quickly. In addition the development teams need to make sure that speed does not sacrifice quality. Something that start-ups have learned is the importance of testing. The growth in popularity of Unit Testing and Test Driven Development (TDD) has been fueled by this. Enterprises need to make sure that they have the necessary testing tools, capabilities and culture in place – something that has been lagging within enterprise development teams. By making testing a constant within the development process they can increase the quality of code. Often in traditional Waterfall environments the test phase was squeezed and so in reality quality and software stability, was sacrificed.
All that glitters is not gold
Finally there is the question of technology. Start-ups have become synonymous with new technologies such as PHP, Ruby on Rails, Django and a host of other platforms, frameworks and services. They tend to gravitate towards these as they believe that they allow them to work more quickly and so focus more time on concerns such as the User Experience of the product. In reality some of these are immature and result in more time being spent firefighting than working on making the product better. Enterprises often deal in legacy software and far larger usage requirements than many start-ups have to deal with initially. A MySQL database may work great with a certain amount of data but as Facebook discovered at scale it can pose challenges. So, don’t throw out the Oracle or the IBM Database just yet. That does not mean that technology is not an issue in the enterprise. With applications now needing to be deployed to an ever increasing number of platforms and devices the underlying technology choices will impact speed of delivery. Having a solution that places as much logic into a single codebase utilising a common language, skillset and tools will have great time and cost saving benefits. As many organisations are constantly discovering, having to maintain multiple codebases in different languages and tools that effectively do the same thing is increasingly time and cost intensive. Therefore approaches such as hybrid mobile development or model driven development will reap rewards especially over time.