What is a good example of individual developer responsibility? Here is just one example.

A developer downloads a copy of the core production database to their own development laptop. Why? Because it’s easy to work with real data, and it’s hard to consider building applicable test data that all engineers can utilize.

What could be wrong with this approach? Here are a few additional points.

• Security. Should the developer accidentally leave their laptop on that 90 minute train commute each way daily, could that data end up with a result of negative publicity for the organization. For employees that work at more sensitive organization is theft a possibility? Or, does that employee become disgruntled by lack of management and with poor ethical values take the names, emails, addresses and purchase history of your customers so it can be used for other means.
• Data Clensing. This includes removing pay rate information of employees of the company that developers should never have access to. It is about obfuscating email address of millions of customers so that test code to improve receipt generate doesn’t accidentally email 1,000 existing customers with a repeat receipt that now contains invalid data. It is about providing a subset of information that is applicable and relevant.
• Testing philosophy. Testing is all about trying to break your software, not testing that one small feature works in the likely path of use. It is easy to unit test the developer change for editing a customer profile to add a emergency contact field. It is right to consider the lifecycle of customer data. Is it knowing you need to consider the full workflow and the multiple paths to creating and editing a customer profile that causes the responsibility of the organization’s need to be consistent for the entire experience, not just one singular perspective . In simple terms it is about functionality testing at the time of development, not the narrow view of unit testing and that other detailed testing is somebody else’s responsibility.
• Time. How long did it take to download the 10G dataset and import it? How much of that data is really needed. Does five years of historical products and orders ensure adequate unit and functional testing. Sure it is easy to have the available disk space however what efficiency improvements could exist for a data set 20x smaller. If it took five minutes to reset the test data for development instead of one hour would a developer refresh more often?

Before considering the means to meet an immediate problem such as this one example, stop, think, and act about improving the process for benefit of all technical resources. This is what sets apart an engineer that is just a coder and a software developer.

It is unfortunate that engineering managers are not constantly focussed on process and productivity improvements for sustaining software for the entire lifecycle of a product. The reality is many have worked as developers without applicable mentoring and management and an entire generation of software developers are now influencing the next generation. Historically, the rigidness of the traditional waterfall approach to the software development lifecycle instills a number of key principles that agile only environments have not fostered or understood.