Multiple team structures can work to deliver software projects. There is no real one size fits all, however, there are common components that can be seen across different structures. At San Digital we believe that Engineer-led teams deliver great results for short duration high-impact projects.
This is called rules of the road but they aren’t rules they’re more guidelines, so they’re rules until there is a good reason to ignore them.
Recently there has been a shift away from time and materials projects towards defined outcomes, driven by various legislative changes, specifically IR35, but also cost control in the procurement function of larger organisations.
San Digital has been designed as a remote first business from inception, on the assumption that it’s easier to add offices later if they are necessary in an agile way. To work in collaborative way completely remotely takes a carefully thought out set of tools. Some of the ones that we use are really standard and some are a little more interesting.
Design processes in most business software development resemble peer review or crowd-sourcing. A putative design is presented to peers, who will do their best to find problems while the originator of the design defends it against these challenges. Ideally, where they are demonstrated incorrect or incomplete the process will iterate and an updated design produced and defended.
Computers analysing and acting on what they see is not science fiction or even a new concept, it has been a reality of humankind’s drive towards hyper-efficiency since around the time I was born.
Scaling frontends is hard, actually scaling all codebases is hard, frontends just happen to be particularly visible and have a tighter feedback loop and a higher rate of change. As with all codebases, it is in principle possible to scale development through standards and integration processes, but these are a poor substitute for communication. Once development moves beyond the scope of a single team, either progress slows to take into account of different processes or implementations drift away from each other over time. Teams need to find a way to operate independently towards a goal.
San Digital have extensive experience of mobile development and the use of Android as an embedded operating system. We treated android as a deployment target target for Rust firmware as well as writing our intricate real time communications component for both iOS and Android. This approach has advantages, you can maintain a single code base for a complicated communications layer, while also taking advantage of the full native capabilities of each platform
At San Digital, some of us have been building things for people since the dawn of the web. Our historical perspective helps inform us about technological culture and trends today, almost compensating for the creaking knees.