Robert on Software Development

When my development team got started on our new product, we established a hierarchy based on product ownership. One developer “owned” a particular piece of the product. Bill owned Documentation, Mark owned UI, Victor owned the Financial module, and so on. This had its own advantages, as it let an individual be the expert about a piece of the development effort, which let him be the go-to guy for any questions about how his piece worked.

However, what we quickly realized is that the application became very disjointed and inconsistent. We were trying to work within the expectation of the stakeholders, who assumed that one developer would handle one logical piece of the application. It makes sense at a high level, but the fact is, software development isn’t an assembly line. (Not that it doesn’t try to be at times.)

When we adopted our agile approach, we decided that no single person would be the sole expert on the system. Some people will learn more about different aspects of the application than others, but through information sharing, everyone would have access to the knowledge of others.

Figuring out how to share that information is the hard part.