What are some things you'd like to improve at work? It could be code related, e.g. automation, refactoring, processes, etc, but it doesn't necessarily need to be developer specific.
Who knows, maybe some folks in the replies will have answers to things you'd like to improve, or if anything it just gets you thinking about things you want to make better. And others might be inspired by your answers to improve things where they work.
Just adding in Jeremy’s follow up question to this discussion as well.
Follow-up question, what's preventing you from taking a step towards improving it?
I'll potentially say the obvious here, but be constructive. Don't use this post as a dumping ground for things that you are unhappy with at work and are looking to vent about.
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Oldest comments (14)
Specifications, specifications, specifications. Especially for new features, the more specification you can give me to reference, the happier I'll be. Alternatively, a quick feedback loop for asking questions, which means that everyone needs to have a reasonable amount of work with minimal context switching, so there are pretty good knock on effects to that as well.
Is you team on Kanban or Scrum?
It can also become to much, at least in my experience. Quick feedback is nice, and where a lot of companies struggle. A lot of times there are one or multiple layers between the developers and the 'real' users of the software.
Organization of tools. We've got a lot of things in a lot of different places. I took me a while to keep up with where I did what.
Documentation on our databases. Many hours spent figuring out bugs could be resolved if the databases had some documentation for what each field represents.
4 days a month dedicated to improvement. And then do stuff like:
so true! especially with the typical deadlines in I.T, if there isn't explicit time scheduled somewhere to clean up, improve, catch up with all the little annoyances and "good enough at the time" patches, technical debt gets out of hand quickly. And it starts having a knock-on impact on future work, because the more messy the foundation is, the harder it is to maintain & extend.
I think what you're suggesting also helps to diminish the "just rush and throw it over the wall when you're done" mentality, which might help encourage a bit more care & tidiness.
Yes, i think there is much to gain when these improvement days are done right.
Easy I have a few, but I feel I should say that revealing anything about your workplace even the smallest thing is enough to mount a social engineering attack on your workplace, don't believe me? The weekest part of security is you, particularly the information you hold that others do not, in terms of benefits a person could pretend to be a delivery person to gain access after learning about your free lunches on Fridays, a service person usual doesn't get many eyes batted
I would like to improve my workspace. There are some things that I always wish I had in order to be more happy when I'm coding. So, buying stuff, basically!
Follow-up question, what's preventing you from taking a step towards improving it?
Mitigate indifference to product and code base development and increase empathy to the common business, domain, values. Without that the fight for quality is lost.
Specification form business people! also UI mockups even I'm front-end engineer but I feel we need somone specialsit in UI/UX instead of wasting time for refactoring and changing UI
Property documented and working downstream systems where the stakeholders that decided to use them also know what they do and what impact it has.
Also, simulation stages for those systems