Coders - False Expectations
This morning, I ran across a very misleading article titled: “Majority of developers spending half, or less, of their day coding, report finds”.
Disturbing to say the least – anyone who thinks that software development means just sitting down and writing code doesn’t have a clue as to how developers really spend their time to create world class apps or web sites. And to make it more depressing, the article was published on a site that supposedly prides itself on understanding and speaking about technology.
While my days of personally being responsible for writing code on a daily basis are long past, the expectation set in this supposed piece of journalism is false and misleading. Developers don’t spend their full day coding because they carry much more responsibility in the overall delivery of the vision of the final product. The role of developers and engineers has changed over the span of time where I have been involved in this profession, and that has allowed us to create better products, that are more friendly to the people using our applications, that are more secure and protect the information passing thru the applications and provide a richer set of features that align with the expectations of the people using the application.
Today, developers/engineers are responsible for working with the product owners and business analysts as the features are being described – providing useful feedback on what is capable and how various expressed wants and needs may impact the overall experience. They are either solely responsible for or share in the technical design and architecture decisions being made that will satisfy the expressed wants and needs from the product owner. They are responsible for thinking thru and implementing the tactical coding of the application – making decisions that will impact the experience and performance of the application. Sometimes the tactical creation of the code means thinking thru or trialing a couple of different options before the final version of the code is put together. The developers/engineers are responsible for and own various pieces of the testing lifecycle – unit testing of specific functions/classes/methods that they have touched, integration testing of their code into the overall broader application and data lifecycle, supporting/executing quality testing, performance testing and regression testing to make sure things didn’t break and that the new code meets quality expectations, support of the user acceptance and beta testing. And after release, they are responsible for responding to production level issues – either thru some warranty period or thru the lifecycle of the application.
Some days, the above activities means that a developer/engineer may not see any time on the keyboard ‘pounding out code’ – other days they may spend 8+ hours on the keyboard. Tactically, there are a thousand ways to satisfy the user stories/requirements identified by the product owner and documented by the business analyst. Good developers spend time to think thru how they will implement specific pieces of code to not only satisfy the requested features/changes to features, but to do it in a way that optimizes the experience and satisfies all of the non-functional requirements related to security, performance and allows for maintainability of the code moving forward.
I take pride in my profession and the changes we are able to make to assist our organizations, our customers and society as a whole to continue to grow and achieve what was once considered impossible.