Velocity – this is something we hear about almost so frequently in the software engineering world. There is an ever-increasing demand for speeding up software development, automating code engineering and testing, and, more recently, even using voice recognition to generate code automatically.
It’s about time that, as an industry, we slow down a little and ask whether we need all this velocity and how much is good enough. Moderation is a beneficial approach, applicable to all aspects of life, including software engineering. This relentless pursuit of faster software development is beginning to cause harm in multiple ways – to products and people. More often than not, it has resulted in nothing more than poor quality. While it may be fashionable to speak about digital transformation, velocity, speed, and the like, it is beneficial to pause occasionally – such a break will most likely reveal that unfettered speed in any context is mostly unnecessary, and left uncontrolled, leads to dissipated energy.
In the context of software, this leads to wasted productivity cycles. In the name of AGILE, process is thrown to the winds, and quality suffers. There are very few – really a small percentage – of software outcomes that are AGILE. The rest of those efforts are simply following no process at all and riding their luck – and because it’s no more fashionable to call software processes anything else, we want to call it AGILE, even if we are failing to execute waterfall projects successfully. Most teams are merely cleaning up defects from a prior sprint in the next sprint, but call themselves AGILE teams because that is what sells.
Software is incredibly pervasive… and that’s a powerful thing. However, if software engineers don’t pace themselves appropriately, this very pervasiveness could ultimately become a curse.
CPJ
