Synthesis : Scott Becker

Standardizing Dev Workflow

Why does every company have their own ad-hoc, rolled together development workflow? I’m talking about the infrastructure around source control, testing, continuous integration if it exists, and the process of releasing to production. Every company has their own approach. Often it’s something that is added in later, after pain has been felt and lessons have been learned. The only companies who seem to have this standardized are consulting companies who work on many projects for many clients, and this is because they get to continually start over and refine their process with each new project.

Isn’t this something that should be productized? Lots of companies have built products around the individual pieces of the puzzle: Github, Atlassian, Pivotal Tracker. That’s not a bad thing, having the ability to swap out various components of the system as needed.

You can’t dictate a full end to end process for a company or a team. Thats part of what (currently) makes a company unique. But you could at least have a template (or multiple?) – maybe its open source or maybe its a product, but instead of rolling your own when you started a new company or project, you run a command (a la “rails new blah”) and you get a running app, checked into git, running in continuous integration, deployed online, wired up to project communication tools etc. 

 

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