RE: The Downside of Tool Autonomy

SSC Guru

Points: 50083

January 31, 2019 at 10:17 am

#2020735

Rod at work - Thursday, January 31, 2019 8:25 AM
Interesting perspective, Steve. I agree with a lot of what you say, but not everything. As a developer, I do enjoy looking at new technologies and techniques. And I do agree with you that, if unchecked, some developers could run after the new and shiny all day long. But by the same token I think it is possible to so restrict developers to a list of "approved technology", that at the end of the day, the only thing they'll ever do is whatever was done in the distant past. I see, too often, the "Hey, VBA was good back 25 years ago! Who cares about the Web or mobile? Just write VBA code!!"

I've worked in an environment where the developers (led by one of the company owners) always seemed to be doing two things at once:

Chasing the current "shiny thing" for the application
Keeping the back end on an unsupported "database" product that last saw an update in the early 90s

What this meant was, when "web based" was the current "shiny thing," they started developing a web front end of the application, while still using the same back end datastore, and did this with developers that were basically learning how to do a web site on the fly. Then, hey, let's move to something else for the front end...
So you end up with something that's a bear-and-a-half to support, has technical debt built way up, and who knows how much of the code is bodged-together-not-sure-why-it-works-but-it-does-so-don't-touch-it.

If you put in place a process to control the introduction of new tech, perhaps even requiring a well-thought explanation as to *why* TechX will be better / improve things than the current TechY, you can keep your technical debt under control, improve the supportability of your software, and (one hopes) get the developers / managers / etc to actually *think* about why they want TechX. If the benefits are worth it, you start using it. If the only reason to use it is "it's new and cool and all the cool kids are using it" then you shelve the idea.