The 2021 Year in Review

When I started summarizing this year as a CTO at FamcareProduct, I expected to talk about new technologies and tools, but I ended up with totally different thoughts. I decided to talk about business growth and team/product scalability issues we face! I will focus on what makes us a more mature technical team.

The most important lesson we learned in 2021 is that small mistakes are most dangerous than big ones, they can hide easily for a longer time, and they can suddenly unite at the wrong time and surprise you with the damage -Small Mistakes Monster- can cause.

Goals, Goals, Goals, Data, Data, Data, you can’t expect your business to succeed without clear goals, and can’t set them or decide what you need to do to achieve without data. As a technical team,?OKRs?helped us see the value of what we did, and change our?definition of done.

Data gathering and event tracking become an essential, not a complementary requirement. We used?Metabase?so the data and other teams to ask questions and visualize data easily with minimal effort from the tech team.?

At the team level, we also have a lot of technical KPIs, Personally interested in three of them:

1. Testing code coverage: while you may see it as a quality metric, the hidden gem of having tests with high test coverage is that you can refactor your code with evidence not to break the code.
2. Cycle time: track the phases each task/branch takes from the first commit to the first appearance in production, make sure the coding, reviewing, and deployment process is short and effective.
3. Review depth: how many comments the reviewer leaves on average on PRs. Both reviewer and reviewee must feel comfortable having a more in-depth discussion rather than quick PR approval.

The team can develop new stories in an ideal sprint, but they will be interrupted by support tickets and bugs or fail to deliver the stories that contain new integration or technologies. So, we decided to split the team into:

• Sprint team:?responsible for the sprint velocity and productivity
• Support team:?focus on bugs fixing, R&D for future stories, and eliminating technical debt.?

Splitting helps us eliminate?task switching and uncertain estimation?risks from the sprint team.

The bigger team you have, the deeper?the Code Review?you need. We take the technical review process to the next level by:?

1. The whole team collaborates on the technical analysis for the sprint scope directly after the planning meeting.?
2. Encourage developers to?review their initial designs?with a teammate using a Work in Progress PR instead of reviewing the final result.?
3. Encourage developers to implement their stories in smaller steps and open?micro-PRs?so the reviewer can focus on every single line and give quick feedback.?

I used?Gitflow Workflow?for years and it works perfectly fine with my teams. Once we started thinking about?Continuous Delivery, the workflow became more complicated and we lost control. We deiced to start using?Trunk-based development?in 2022, and we will return to you with the result very soon.

We implemented tons of features and experiments during this year, most of them failed to deliver the expected results so, the business decided to stop them during the year. We ended up with a lot of complexity at the code level and decided to delete all of these dead features and code. It’s time to take the experiments to the next level and start using?feature flags?and refactor old code to make it?extendable.

Happy New Year!