Developing Responsibility

This past weekend, all of the product development teams as SciQuest came in on Saturday morning for one of the three release days each year. This ritual helps those building the site feel greater ownership of it and responsibility for their work over the past several months.

There are many ways to help foster this personal connection to the end product, but I have found this to be one of the more effective ones out there. On that day, at that time, we all must be present to verify our latest changes are correctly applied to the live, production system. When we sign off, we are putting our names on the line both as a source of pride at what we've accomplished and a sense of ownership of the results.

Today, across the country and beyond SciQuest customers will be using new code and functionality that has been carefully developed and validated by us. The details of the release can be found in the Release Library.

One other new means of instilling responsibility in the development teams is that a Java developer will work closely with the live system's production support team over the course of each release. This time, the developer is from my team and he's starting in with them today. He'll get first-hand experience with the kinds of issues customers encounter. In turn, he'll be able to relay those to the rest of the department to help us write even better code in the future.

It is my firm belief that developers and customers both benefit from more direct shared experiences. I'm proud to be working for a company that seeks out opportunities to encourage that, even if it means that I'm at the office for a few hours on a Saturday morning. Also, if I am going to be in the office on a Saturday, I plan to have a bit of fun with it. Hence the exciting costume; you can call me a code wizard, if you wish.

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