22 Oct 2010 idcmp   » (Journeyer)

Who Owns Your Code?

At work, our marketing team is in control of deciding where development spends time on products. This is an effective way to ensure that our product meets the needs of the market we're in.

In fact, I would say we have an effective backlog of "big features" that are desired by our target market. We're only limited by the resources we have on hand to deliver these features. Therein lies the challenge; almost every feature is done on a tight timeline, and once it's in a non-laughable state, it's released and the team goes on to the next big feature. No time is really spent revisiting the overall design of the product, or just bringing its dependencies up to date.

In a previous workplace, the development team had strong say on what was worked on. This was an effective way to ensure the product was relatively nice to work on and its technology up to date. New features were strongly scrutinized and often there was a focus on picking newer technologies that made it easier to develop and service. The challenge was we'd fall behind on bolting on new business features from time to time.

In yet another workplace, our SEO team had the strongest say in what happened. Our main products were publicly accessible websites, but I feel like this was a pretty unique situation. Many technical decisions had to be discussed with the SEO team (which CMS should be chosen, which captcha system should be employed, etc..) and everything from character set encodings, performance trade offs and cache expiry times needed to have their approval. Our challenge there was that the success of some SEO practices are not easily measured, it was difficult to assign a ROI on particular decisions.

Who owns your product? How does that shape it?


Syndicated 2010-10-22 03:05:00 (Updated 2010-10-22 04:45:46) from Idcmp

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