Full Contact Web Development

As the super bowl nears you can’t avoid constant bombardment of advertising, predictions and analysis leading up to the game. You can either fight it or embrace it. I personally love the sport so today I am embracing it in the context of web development.

Football like web development is driven by a number of specialist chasing the same goal. Each specialist bring unique talents to the table to achieve success and weakness at any position or bad overall chemistry can lead to failure. So lets take a look at some of these positions and see how far we can take this analogy…​

First your engineers are your offensive line. Typical of offensive linemen they do a lot of the heavy lifting and often don’t receive a lot of attention. And for many that’s just fine. You might have some rockstars here or there but success is measured by how well the unit as a whole performs rather than individual performance. Case and point a rockstar programmer’s elegant but confusing design might weigh down the team instead of lifting it up. Most projects are too large for your single rockstar to handle themselves so unless others can work with the solutions they develop the team is often better off without them. Unfortunately engineers like linemen have difficulty tracing their work directly to outcomes. Often a job well done just enables another person to do there job upon which the project’s success hinges. However on the flip side a poorly done job can blow the whole project up. Having a solid engineering team is important to enable the rest of the team to do their job. Like the best units in the NFL good engineering teams are experienced, communicate, and they understand what the guy next to them is doing (cross trained).

Your User Experience and Front End Development teams are your wide receivers. These folks do work that is very visible and often takes a great deal of skill some of which is hard to quantify. Some people seem to have it and others don’t. Given their position they have the opportunity to make huge plays. They are given some freedom on the routes they take when the requirements change. But one of the issues of playing exclusively outside the hash is that they often don’t understand some of the other things going on in the game. There is sometimes conflict when they’re not getting thrown to enough. Sometimes the game plan calls for establishing an architecture that may prove some of their designs difficult to implement. However there are many receivers that do understand these things and are willing blockers and they work to understand all aspects of the game. There are even some UX/FED developers that dabble in engineering (and vice versa). These folks are the rare hybrids that I’d label a tight end. Like the best receivers good UX and FED enjoy the visibility of there work, they work to align to the strategy being employed in a given game and they almost never drop the ball.

Your Development Leads are your running backs. These are the folks that carry the load and run head first into problems all day long. There are some that do this with some flash and others that just grind it out. There is some glory at these positions but it’s also heavily criticized. A receiver might drop a few balls and still have a good game. However if a running back fumbles only once every few games it’s a black mark. This is also a position that can let success go to it’s head. Most of the great running backs understand that they are dependent on the rest of the team. It’s not surprising that the great Walter Payton was known to take teammates (especially his linemen) out to dinner after big games. Like great running backs the best leads spread the credit around.

Your PM and Delivery Managers are your Quarterbacks. These folks are calling the shots on the field and determining who needs to be where and when. They are judged on some statistics but at the end of the day it’s how many times did they win the big one. Although unlike football in development you often have more than one person in this position on a project. Just like in football this causes problems since there’s nothing like a good quarterback controversy to screw up team chemistry. One way to make this work is to separate the roles so that you’ve got quarterbacks by committee. But even that’s not a silver bullet. In the end the most successful approach is to get them to understand that they are all on the same team working towards the same set of goals. Easier said than done. The best quarterbacks are the ones that can spread the ball around and always end up with the win (even if it’s not pretty). Those are the types you want in those Project Manager and Delivery Manager roles.

Quality Analyst and Business Analysts comprise your defense. You might have the best offense group in the game but if you’re not delivering what your customers want you still end up losing. Great defenses are dynamic and can adapt to take away or contain different things that an offense may throw at it. On any given project there’s almost no way you can cover all the test cases or capture all the requirements but if you can determine what the most important ones are you’re usually going to be just fine. Good analysts need to be relentless, have great instincts, and sometimes even a little unorthodox. From my experiences there are a lot of places that have good serviceable analysts however very few that have truly great ones.

Finally Operations is your special teams unit. Unfortunately these are the guys everyone forgets about because it seems like their job is automatic…​ until something goes wrong. Operations teams need to be extremely discipline and need to be composed of unique individuals. You don’t find a lot of people willing to run full speed with a ball with 11 other guys running full speed at them. Just like you won’t find many people that are able to fix production defects at 3 AM while the rest of the development team is asleep. Ops teams often have very specialized skills that are not always found in other positions in development teams. Good operations folks are selfless, a little crazy, but when then time comes they deliver (almost automatically).

I hope you’ve enjoyed my ode to the super bowl. Unfortunately I will once again be watching a Bear-less Super Bowl. But I can always root against the Patriots. Go Giants!