When the idea of software development as a craft became popular, a lot of the talk was about “professionalism”, “mastery” and “beautiful code”. But this missed the point of craft, and arguably helped to alienate business stakeholders, giving them the impression software craft was some kind of esoteric pursuit with no value to businesses.
Nothing could be further from the truth. When we shift the focus from what craft means to us as developers, we can consider how practices like continuous testing, refactoring, modular design and continuous integration impact businesses.
The disciplines of code craft enable continuous delivery – the ability to ship working software that does what the customer wants at any time, and to do that reliably and sustainably.
No delays. No need for an “acceptance testing” or “stabilisation phase”. No downtime or frantic bug fixing after release. The software’s what was agreed, and it’s ready to go at the push of a button. Again, and again, and again, for as long as the business needs.
This dramatically shrinks lead times on new features and changes, making software much more responsive to changing business needs.
The mistake a lot of organisations have made is believing that the key to agility is what they’ve heard of as “Agile” – Scrum, Lean, Kanban etc. Nu-uh! The key to /real/ agility is code craft, and you build your “Agile” processes around those technical disciplines.
Because if the software’s not fit for release at any time, all the stand-up meetings, burndown charts and Jira tickets won’t amount to more than “Agility Theatre”. This is why so many “Agile transformations” failed. You can’t manage your way to software agility without building that capability in your dev teams.
If you’re serious about building your team’s capability to rapidly, reliably and sustainably evolve software to meet rapidly changing business needs, my Code Craft and Test-Driven Development live remote training workshops are HALF PRICE if delivered by March 31st 2025.
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