High ROI Engineering Activities

How do you know which techniques to use to shape your software throughout the life cycle?  Start with the high Return On Investment (ROI) activities as a baseline set.  You can always supplement or modify for your scenario.

Most development shops have some variations of the following activities:

· Design guidelines

· Architecture and design review

· Code review

· Testing

· Deployment review

Identifying design guidelines involves putting together a set of recommendations for the development team.  The recommendations address key engineering decisions such as exception management and include input from software vendor recommendations, corporate policies, industry practices, and patterns.  This is a high ROI activity because it helps creates the scaffolding for the project.

Architecture and design review is an exercise in evaluating the design against functional requirements, non-functional requirements, technological requirements and constraints.  It can be as simple as a whiteboard sketch or it can involve multiple documents, diagrams, and presentations.  An architecture and design review is most valuable when it’s performed early enough to help shape your design.  It’s less valuable when it’s performed late enough that it’s only function is to find “do overs.”

What better way to find problems than at the source?  Code review is a practical and effective way for finding quality issues.  While some issues can be found through static analysis tools, the advantage of a manual code review is contextual analysis (e.g. you know the usage scenario and likely conditions).

Testing is executable feedback for your software.  It works or it doesn’t.  If it works “right” is a bit trickier to establish.  The ideal case is where you establish an executable contract between your code and the requirements, including functional, non-functional and constraints.  It also helps to know what you’re looking for so you can test against it.   While testing is usually optimized around functional behavior, you can tune it for quality attributes depending on your ability to set measurable objective and to define what good looks like.

Deployment review is an evaluation of your application deployed to your infrastructure.  It’s where the rubber meets the road.   This is where you evaluate the impact of configuration settings against runtime behavior.   A deployment review can be your last actionable checkpoint before going into production.  Preferably you have a working build of software earlier vs. later in your development cycle so that early deployment reviews can help reduce surprises going into production.

What makes these activities high ROI activities is that, if applied properly, they directly impact the shape of the software throughout the process. I know these are high ROI activities because I’ve seen them transform my customers’ results for the better. These activities provide key feedback and action at high-leverage points in the development process.