Tech

Building software today: Design thinking, hybrid teams, and of course DevOps


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Design team and software development team do not always work in the same room, or more appropriate these days, in the same virtual space. But in an age where users and customers have many digital options available, apps need to be elegant, easy to use, and even invisible if possible.

The growing combination of design and development is just one of many changes shaping the world of software. Being part of a software team means working with others in a collaborative fashion, building ever smaller blocks of functionality.

Those are words from Fletcher PrevinCisco’s CIO and formerly IBM’s CIO, who redesigned the company’s own software operations after the COVID era.

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He said in an interview at the company’s New York office: “I built and brought a design team into the IT department to lead in user experience and results — we design from the user side back, instead of the IT department and outsideā€. “Every minute people spend grappling with something distracts them from the work they were hired to do. So we’re emphasizing those experiences, removing conflict from the environment. , helping people do their best work.”

For many companies, until recently, having a design team and experience working directly with developers “was a really novel concept, think about growing from the prism of experience.” first and then the solution,” added Previn. “But there’s less tolerance for an awkwardly bad experience. The goal is to surround people with what they need without them even knowing it. And facilitate hybrid work, which is a series of things. very important IT challenges that need to be addressed right — security, remote access, way of working, culture.”

While the design community is often a completely separate community from IT, Previn believes the two groups of experts need to work more closely, in an Agile fashion. “It’s good when you have UX teams designing and researching content on a project, where we know the outcome will be better,” he says. “The urgency of the design team’s involvement is highest,” he adds, when it comes to “high-value interactions that we want to get right.”

Also: User Experience: Not all about the user and not really an experience

Design thinking It’s just one of many important transitions currently taking place with software development — from a coding mindset to a pre-built components mindset.

Applications themselves are being broken down into increasingly smaller components, from APIs to the cloud to containers and microservices — and even more so, Previn says. “You want portability, containerability, and manageability across environments consistently, so you don’t need to know which environment the applications are running on. There is a common application architecture. that you see in a lot of companies. A lot of that stuff is going to be broken down and broken down into smaller pieces.” For example, he notes, “The functionality of large suites will be broken down. Everything and the kitchen sink of large software applications for which you are paying a lot of money will be broken down into small pieces. than.”

Collaborative work with teams across geographies now also defines software work. Previn said that while telework offers productivity and hiring advantages, there are cases where closer collaboration is needed. “In February 2020, I said how important it is to get teams working in some sort of collaborative way, with Scrum Agile teams, to work collaboratively in some sort of xOps.” Working directly together is no longer necessary, but that feeling of “together” needs to be maintained. “It’s okay to move work globally, but not in groups.”

For example, he notes, “It’s important to have some sort of time zone co-localization, plus or minus three. It’s hard to have some of those DevOps celebrations at 8 a.m. me and 11 o’clock at night to you You don’t want to spend all day emailing and stuff You want to have some of these rituals while you’re building software You don’t have to be in the same room, but there really shouldn’t be people who differ by more than a few hours in terms of time zones.”

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Previn believes that team cohesion — whether employee or outsourced, locally or in different time zones — is crucial to software projects. “It’s okay to have teams on the other side of the world, but you don’t want to split that team. And if we outsource, we want them to work the same way we’re doing, we have a similar interpretation of what we’re doing. Agile and that you’re building Agile teams in their entirety, there’s no revolving door of creating and not founding these teams.”

Talents that Previn finds in high demand today include network security, “as well as those well versed in Agile and DevOps.” Designers also have a high demand for UX, UI, content analysis, and research. But most of all, he added, “I’m looking for people who are kind, passionate about their craft and believe in our purpose as an organization. If we were around people like So we’ll be successful.”

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