- What are we making? Why does it work on a domain level?
- Feedback. This thing I've built, does it do what it needs to do? No? What needs to change? Two-way conversation.
Finally, I would say that while writing code is important, it's also important to be able to read code, and to remove code. It's as important to be able to read what others have written as to be able to compose your own, or surgically remove pieces.
Software engineering on a live product feels like adding features to an aircraft in mid-flight. Imagine how much communication that would take to have a half dozen engineers crawling over the wings, swapping out engines, adjusting the fuel mixture, maybe even entirely changing the power supply. Especially when we assign totally different features to each engineer with the expectation that they are all worked on simultaneously.
One engineer has been asked by a naive product owner to remove the wings "for aesthetics". A junior engineer thinks we should be wind powered or something. A senior engineer has gone rogue and is trying to replace all the aluminum with titanium.
This aircraft doesn't even have landing gear, it'll never come down other than to crash. Meanwhile we crawl all over it, needing constant communication to keep from making a fatal change. Also the average tenure of an engineer on this aircraft is two years, just enough time to get the hang of it before jumping to the next aircraft.
It's amazing we even spend 20% of the time coding.
This is why I'm a big fan of pairing and mobbing. Fewer streams of work paradoxically allows for faster feature development because of reduced communication and training costs.
This is why I have my engineering teams only given X/2 streams of work where X was the number of engineers. I want more people thinking about finishing fewer tasks. Which means on average they spend about 28 hours a week writing code, far more than the industry average of 8 hours. This also reduces rework.
- What are we making? Why does it work on a domain level?
- Feedback. This thing I've built, does it do what it needs to do? No? What needs to change? Two-way conversation.
Finally, I would say that while writing code is important, it's also important to be able to read code, and to remove code. It's as important to be able to read what others have written as to be able to compose your own, or surgically remove pieces.