Alex Cruise, architect and development manager at Splunk, joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss the development culture, organizational structure, and some use cases for Splunk, the company that brings us log monitoring and analysis tools and services.
Cruise explains a little about LeSS (Large Scale Scrum), and how their team has been adopting it as a means of escaping some of the failure modes of traditional small-scale agile. LeSS involves things like a unified product backlog, such that every item that a product manager deems being worthy of being worked on, goes onto the shared product backlog.
One of the main reasons for Cruise’s teams to make a transition towards LeSS is to reduce hyperspecialization. Mature organizations tend to have people who develop a great deal of expertise within a narrow field. With these hyperspecialized experts, it becomes increasingly difficult for someone new to get up to speed and be productive on a codebase where someone else is already a specialist. LeSS helps to break this coupling between individuals and teams, and particular product features they historically were experts in.
Cruise also shares his thoughts on what it means to be a senior developer, including increasingly spending more time communicating and mentoring, and doing more leadership type tasks. Additionally, this includes commenting on Wiki pages, reviewing code, training, and helping people to solve their own problems, while spending less time on one’s own deliverables.
Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect
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