The eternal truth to software development is its inability to produce any meaningful systems without a coordinated effort from a diverse team of individuals, lots of disparate activities ranging from design to development and quality assurance and finally with the same effort applied to the maintenance and operations of a running system. From the deployment of patches and extensions, to the cleanup and data hygiene of databases to the scaling of the system and hardware and software maintenance efforts.
As much time and effort is spent in the art of software development, often not much effort is spent during the operations phase of a software project.
A rule I’ve often observed in many many projects I’ve been part off is the linear degradation in the effort of maintaining all the scaffolding and activities which are not directly related to coding of a software project. Thus enabled entropy degrades the product and seeps into its operations lifecycle resulting in emotional and business drawbacks for both the organization and the stakeholders included in the project.
Should we accept this? Should we accept a system of development with diminishing software engineering efforts , should we accept the fallibility of people to care and work at top quartile engineering capacity?
I’ve seen that any significant software system, shop and development environment needs guardians in the form of an engineering educated project manager and a strong cadre of technical leaders which have the authority and will to enact and drive and force a strong commitment to all software engineering scaffolding practices which combat the intrinsic entropy found in all human endeavors, especially software development with its heavy intellectual burden, high abstract concepts and emotional stresses.
A common image of software developers is of introverted emotionally challenged people. Truth be told I’ve worked with quite a few of them in my time. Thus a surprising aspect of our live is the emotional toll software development takes from each of us which is directly linked to the quality of work we do and the state of the system.
Human emotions, feelings and states directly transfer to the work we do. The pain of working with highly abstract concepts, what in truth software development is, is the primary source of all the bad decisions, all the accumulated technical depts., all unsolved problems and defects a system has.
In order to ensure a proper functioning of a system and a team special need needs to be put in and placed under constant guardianship in order to focus on emotional and mental health of the team working under such adverse, but normal conditions.
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