One of the engineering principles we adhere to at Redgate, is to write down Architectural Decision Records “each time anyone is about to embark on a significant architectural change”. The steps we go through are:
- Do planning before building something new. This can be in-person white-boarding or just talking it through with the team members, if you’re all clear on how you will get things done. We encourage looking at existing ADRs and using a similar approach.
- Capture this plan in a short, written document. Once it is clear to the team how and what you do, it should be relatively quick to write down the “how”. Don’t go overboard. …
The Guv’nors team (responsible for the Data Masker and Data Catalog products) has been mobbing extensively — in fact almost exclusively — for the past six months. This has proven particularly useful as the team have undergone significant personnel changes during this same time. By focusing on mobbing, the team has been able to successfully offboard three engineers and onboard two while continuing to deliver frequent customer value.
Wait, what is mob programming again?
Mob programming is a software development paradigm in which “the whole team works on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and at the same computer”. It’s a scaled-up pair programming technique where the whole team has a laser-like focus on a single critical task. For more information on mob programming, we’d recommend reading “Tackling SQL Prompt’s Parser with Mob Programming” and “… something on Mob Programming with Woody Zuill”. …
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