There is definitely such a thing as having too much process in a development cycle, and, of course, conversely there is definitely such as thing as having too little process.
I like to surround myself with people (well, mostly developers) that believe that a little time investing in a lean process goes a long way. Let’s take, for example, implementing SCRUM meetings, not the entire SCRUM methodology, just the daily meeting.
I was once told that a daily meeting, lasting 5-10 minutes was asking too much, and that the development team would rather just code. Unfortunately, it turns out that we ended up having one to two hour long meetings every few days to “sync-up” and reorganize with what could have been accomplished in a fraction of that time.
To be honest, I’ve never been a part of a SCRUM meeting, YET! But I can whole-heartedly see the value in it.
- Everyone knows what everyone is working on
- Everyone knows where the “trouble spots” are
- It is not a witch-hunt or a blame-game when problems arise
- No one is stuck “churning” on a particular piece of functionality
SCRUM meetings can be such a simple process, and they don’t (really) have to involve any management intervention. It could be taken upon the developers alone, so that they can all benefit from its outcomes. With SCRUM, individual failures reflect on the team, and if you start blaming one developer, the team has failed. I believe that under SCRUM the success or failure of the project is on the team as a whole, so it’s less about pointing fingers and more about solving problems collaboratively.
On the flip side, I’ve had experience in which there was too much process in a developer cycle. Where the dev team would spend more time in meetings, Monday through Wednesday, than coding. Every decision had to be deliberated with the core/senior development team, who would then hash it up, and deliver it to the management team, who would then package it and hand it over to the CIO, who would then add notes and pass it back down through the chain. And the decisions were trivial, such as should we use a drop-down list, or a checkbox group. These decisions can and sometimes should be left up to the development and user-experience team members, and shouldn’t involve more people than absolutely necessary.
There is a time and place for a process that works for your development team, and finding and implementing that process should definitely be a collaborative effort. At a minimum a SCRUM-type daily meeting doesn’t add much additional time to your normal routine, but, I believe it will strike up the right kind of collaboration and conversations afterward to keep the project’s momentum going.
