Write Five, Then Synthesize Good Engineering Strategy Is Boring - Will Larson

This resource first appeared in issue #52 on 27 Nov 2020 and has tags Technical Leadership: Other, Strategy: Other

Write Five, Then Synthesize: Good Engineering Strategy Is Boring - Will Larson

Focus enable strategy - not only what you’ll be doing, but how you’ll be doing it.

Developing a software development strategy for a team allows you to focus on the important parts of each project rather than bikeshedding the same decisions again and again. You can’t develop such a strategy for executing projects if each project is completely different.

Larson’s article is an argument in favour of grounding such a strategy in the pragmatic (e.g. boring) and avoiding the siren call of “innovation” by doing it from the ground up - writing multiple decision documents for individual projects or components, and discovering the underlying strategy by synthesizing them.