Dear HR Director,

I decided to write this letter, because for over five years I have worked with software engineers on their effectiveness and seen how organisational values influence software developers work.

Probably you have defined a mission statement and values in your organisation. But did you ever noticed their correlation to a quality of the source code or development processes?

Developers too often take organisational values with a grain of salt. They tell me these are just only "posters" on the walls or on their screen savers. But for me - an outer observer - it definitely is obvious that a mission statement and organisational values do their job. And do it well.

So, what I have seen? Organisations where values statements looks like:

  • We put our customers first
  • Our success is customers satisfaction
  • A customer can't wait
  • We are professionals
  • We do everything for our customers
and that is all, that organisations mostly (I said: m o s t l y) have a lot of multitasking and technical debt inside. That two lead to the even more multitasking and more smelling code as a consequences.

To be precise: all values above are good. I would be proud to identify myself with one of them. But, the problem is the values are not defined clearly enough. Engineers, managers and non-technical stuff simply do not know what to do. They try to satisfy organisational values so much, so they do just only one thing possible to be done: they guess what to do.

Of course, every individual guesses on its own account. In addition clients and deadlines bring the pressure to the teams. And here a multitasking and lack of decision making start working on software quality.

So please, define your organisational values. Define at least:
  • What kind of behaviours are acceptable
  • What kind of behaviours are not acceptable
I emphasised "behaviour" word on purpose. You have to be precise. People do not understand "be professional" but they clearly understand "do a code review". And last but not least - do what you said.


Yours sincerely,
Michal

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