Recently an ex-colleague wrote a blog about support teams and their role in the world of Agile Software Development that used some rather emotive and denigrating language about Software Developers. He focussed on what he perceived as Software Developers lack of care and attention to what happens to their software after it’s released to production.
He added some emotive and unhelpful language which stated, that in his opinion, Software Developers in an agile development are:
- focused only on coding, implying they don’t care about anything beyond ‘code’.
- lazy
- malicious
- only interested in the next cool technology
However, under the distracting emotional language he was trying to make the point that he felt Agile teams adopt a ‘throw it over the wall’ attitude to production support.
His suggested antidote was more documentation, knowledge articles, embedding support team members in development ‘projects’ and, above all else, good old fashioned ITIL with a dedicated support team to look after software in production.
I would whole heartedly agree with this….ten to fifteen years ago this was a valid model for software support.
But it’s not 2000, or even 2005, anymore. Modern Lean and Agile development and support rely on a characteristic that he highlighted in developers and that I agree with and am proud of:
Development Cycle 