Software Development - More Than Coding

Think about software development. I'm assuming you have an image of someone writing code in your mind. Well software development is that, also. But it's also much, much more.

In my company I'm responsible for the software development in this more broader sense. When I think about software development, everything begins from the customers. Developing software is solving customers' problems. Selecting what problems to tackle as a company is a strategic choice. Strategy narrows down what you develop and helps the company focus. Probably it also states in which markets you want to compete in.

Strategy helps the company define it's portfolio. What customer problems we want to solve and what kind of solutions we offer? The solutions can be products or services. Strategy should guide you in this. If it doesn't, refine the strategy.

Let's now assume that in your offering/portfolio you have product(s). Each product should have a vision. What the product will be in the future? What customer problems will it solve when it will be in it's ultimate, final form. (This form will never see the daylight. Vision serves as a distant goal, something to strive for. It's an idealisation that will be even more magnificent when you get closer.)

Vision will help you define a roadmap. Where as vision can be hazy, the roadmap should be really concrete and tangible. I think of roadmap as a guidebook for the next steps toward the vision. If your strategy is planned for the next 5-10 years, roadmap could cover maybe 3 years. It's worth noting that it's still a high level plan and as for any agile plan, subject to changes.

In software development roadmap is implemented in releases of new software versions. They are usually developed in iterative and incremental fashion. Old functionality is modified and improved with new features and bugs and defects are fixed. Many times companies try to shorten their release cycle. The ultimate case would be Continuous Deployment where every change would be deployed to customers. But this is very much industry specific. In some cases the overhead of taking new software version into use is so big that customers don't want to do that often. Then it's practical to select a release cycle that suits both the company and the customers.

In agile development, software is usually created by small teams in an iterative fashion. The length of these iterations or sprints is usually limited to less than a month, a little bit depending on the selected methodology. Sprints are like mini-projects; they are planned, executed and in the end there are sessions for examining the results and for learning from the experience. ...and then cycle starts over again.

Daily work in sprints is carried out by the development team. Developers are experts in their field and select the most fitting methods for the implementation. They have the authority for carrying out daily decisions.

We got to the part where the coder writes source code. But as there are many layers in onion, there are many layers in software development. Writing the code is just one of them. Never the less, it's an important craft if the software is to be of any use and even more so if it is to be maintained.