Developer Professionalism

Developer Professionalism

To be paid, is not enough to make one a professional

What is a developers job?

To THINK. Coding is a puzzle, puzzles are worked out best by thinking

To deliver. On time, on function and on quality

To be responsible. Taking personal responsibility

To never stop learning. Constant and Never-ending Improvement (CANI)

A developer is

Punctual. To be on time is to show respect

Prepared. To add value to a meeting is to be ready

Proactive. Having in mind the consequence and advising on the risk are part of the job, you must drive asking about the requirements, drilling down to the details, raising the risks, getting help!

Persistent. No problem is insoluble, balance asking for help with research

Precise. In speech and in code exactitude is a hallmark

Positive. Decide to be positive but act with caution

Prevention Minded. What could happen if this is wrong?

A developer is not

Overconfident, humility with confidence is the balance

Arrogant, confidence is not arrogance

Sloppy, neatness is important, clean code is maintainable, safe and correct

Hurried, acting with tempo is not hurry, the more important the task the more you should think about the consequences (be like an air traffic controller, become more calm the more the crisis escalates).

Late, on-time delivery, on quality, on spec build confidence

A cowboy. Process exists to protect the developer and the customer.

7 habits of successful developers

Understand that understanding is incremental, requirements are nearly impossible to articulate, so doing a little then showing it to the customer insures that what is delivered is what is needed.

Develop incrementally

Test continuously with well thought out unit tests peer reviewed by others

Have your peers validate your code and design

Care about doing the same for others

Obey and evangelize standards

Leverage tools and go with the tool not against them

7 deadly sins

Coding too quickly, time spend in design equals quality in code

No or bad unit tests

Failing to keep source control in sync

Pushing code to production, no developer should ever do this

Deployment w/o a rollback

Skipping standards you dont like

Not honoring peer review e.g. skipping it or ignoring the results

The XP Process in a nutshell

Get a problem to solve, make it small enough to solve in a day or so

Think about what should be tested to determine what done means in terms of functionality and block out the required tests

Write a little code and test it, refractor

As you develop comment and check for standards

When all the tests pass, do a final standards check and then initiate peer review

Work with the PM to show and tell it to the customer if not done already

When the issues relating to peer review have been dealt with (either fixed or queued up for next time) check in and inform the build team the code is ready for build and QA

Repeat until there are no more tasks for the release

Start on the next release

In XP what does QA do?

QA does not exist to test developers code or to find functionality bugs

QA role is to assure that the integrated products perform as specified

QA Advises on what the required unit tests should be

QA judges if the deployment instructions/process is sufficient