The Forgotten Features

Those of us that work in the technology industry can very easily demonstrate the traits of magpies, becoming distracted by the new and shiny, always wanting to break new ground and be first.

Sometimes this can be at the expense of taking care of what may appear to be the mundane but what it is actually the life blood that is paying the bills.

This is not an argument against innovation, it is instead an acknowledgement that the right to embark on such escapades must be earned by making your core offering bullet proof.

To forget about these features will taint any advances you may make in other areas with the anger and frustration of your users.

Performance

Users are generally very impatient people, the move towards a more mobile world has only increased this tendency.

While it may seem obvious that your site or app should be performant, our excitement at the unveiling of our latest and greatest sometimes blinds us to the fact that the users patience is unaffected by this anticipation.

Set minimum requirements around the performance of certain key aspects of your system, this should especially concentrate on aspects affecting access, the time taken to login or the time taken to checkout.

Also don't become to complacent when your code runs like a rocket during development when it only has to service you as a single user, a lack of performance at scale is unfortunately all to common.

Available at Scale

Even the coolest of new features carries very little impact when users can't access it.

Scale is a consequence of success, to not have an effective strategy for scaleability is to have no plan on how to deal with success.

Scale also costs, even in a cloud computing world throwing more tin at the problem will become very expensive very quickly.

We have never had so many tools for dealing with scale, creating an elastic infrastructure to have multiple nines of up time is within everyones reach. Being down should be considered a sin with the penance being disgruntled users who may never come back into the fold.

Pay attention to errors and understand the workload your system is under by unwavering analysis of how and when your users are most active.

Deployability

If you question your users on what features they would like to see its unlikely any of them would mention deployability.

They may not know it but they want this.

If software isn't easily deployable then it is slow and ineffective at delivering value, no user benefits from code being in source control, effective continuous integration is the mechanism for implementing continuous delivery of value.

This leads to continuous bug fixes, continuous security patches and new features being available the instant they are ready.

Being continuous isn't about cadence no matter how regularly you deploy, its about there being no barriers to deployment and having the ability to deploy whenever you want to.

Even though they may not have asked for it your users will thank you for it.

If you ask users if they would like to see this or that feature they will invariably say yes, don't take this to mean that they want your system to resemble a Swiss army knife.

If you ask them what is bugging them about using your site or app, some may mention a potential new feature but most will talk about problems that can be linked back to performance, scaleability or availability.

Put simply, users aren't asking for the world they just want things to work. Satisfy this ambition by concentrating on what your core offering to them is and make your system the most effective delivery mechanism for that offering the world has ever seen.

Once your able to make this claim the time for innovation will come but never at the expense of any of these to often forgotten features.

The Modern Age

All industries can point to different eras as practices, techniques and perceived wisdom undergo constant evolution.

Many would point to technological industries as taking this to extremes with the pace of change often deemed to be frightening.

While I think this aspect of the industry is often over exaggerated it is undeniable for such a comparatively young discipline software engineering has evolved and changed many times.

If this is true then what defines this modern era of software development?

Continually Under Attack

There has been a proliferation of the use of technology such that it influences every part of modern life, along with this ever increasing use of technology has come an ever greater understanding of how to harness it.

Never have so many people known enough to be dangerous.

Whilst IT security has always been a concern its importance in any modern day system is now such that it is negligent in the extreme for it not to be given focus.

Expose any piece of technology to the internet and you may be shocked at the speed at which it will start to be probed and investigated. These attempts won't always be malicious but many will be looking for weaknesses and vulnerabilities that may lead to a bounty.

An entire industry now exists solely to facilitate these attacks, newly found exploits being shared in kit form to allow anyone with even the most minimal computing skills to be a potential threat.

In the modern day it pays to be paranoid, everyone is out to get you.

Cloudy Days Ahead

The workhorses of an internet driven world are servers, everything can eventually be traced back to these pieces of tin.

An appreciation for the building and maintenance of these boxes used to be a primary skill for someone wishing to deploy software to them.

The advent of the cloud has removed that requirement, in the modern day only suckers build servers.

The arrival of the cloud should lead us all to a mindset that its a waste of a valuable and talented resource to have engineers working on already solved problems.

By using the services offered by the cloud, whether this be PaaS, SaaS or IaaS, we can ensure we concentrate on the areas where we can add value. How much value are we really able to add to building infrastructure others have already mastered?

The days of developers having to worry about problems with the JVM, disk IO or registry settings should be very much over.

Although our industry is young we should look to take advantages of the areas of maturity we do have and not think our wheel can be better than the ones already invented.

Always be Deploying

Traditionally we operated in a world of releases cycles, set points in time when we released software.

This cadence brought with it a gradual rise in tension culminating in a stressful pushing of the button to deploy to production.

Thankfully we have learnt from these scars and developed technology to ease the process of delivery, this combined with the emergence of the cloud has made our release strategy must simpler, in the modern world when software is ready we ship it.

The drive to develop this technology wasn't a war on complexity it was a war on fear.

Fear comes from uncertainty and what we have come to realise is human processes foster that uncertainty. The monotony of automation applying unrelenting consistency takes away that fear and allows us to manoeuvre ourselves to a position where deployment is a consequence of work being completed not a conscious and fearful action.

Someone may well look back on this post in years to come and think it quaint thinking I'm describing advances that themselves have been superseded. But hopefully we are still following a strategy that the best way to deliver technology is with technology.

Problems and threats may change and we have to adapt our practices to suit but ultimately our core skill set is technological, we are experts in it and therefore it is probably the root to a solution to our current set of problems.