Creating software as an individual developer is hard enough. Working in teams to deliver complex, secure enterprise applications is extraordinarily difficult.
To mitigate this challenge, software development requires tooling – and the better the tools, the better the result, especially when working in teams.
Teamwork, of course, requires collaboration, so it makes sense that collaboration tools are among the most important in any software team’s toolbelt.
However, some tools are too prescriptive, slowing down developers with patterns and rules and guidelines when instead they should be speeding the developers up.
Other collaboration tools are too general – offering the basics of collaboration to be sure but lacking the software development context so essential to delivering great apps.
The search is on, therefore, for the right balance: the Goldilocks of software development collaboration tooling that’s just right. Here’s how to find that Goldilocks collaboration tool.
Papa Bear and Baby Bear: The Two Extremes of Software Development Collaboration
Perhaps the most familiar enterprise collaboration tool is Slack. No one can argue with Slack’s broad adoption and extensive functionality.
It is also certainly the case that many software development teams use Slack as their primary collaboration tool. That being said, Slack doesn’t provide the software development context that such teams would prefer.
Now that Slack is a part of Salesforce, the context for its collaborations have been subtly shifting toward sales and marketing, which makes perfect sense for any Slack customers who are also Salesforce customers.
For software development teams, however, Slack only provides a general collaboration context. Teams must add any development-specific elements manually via integrations.
Connecting various tools together, however, doesn’t improve the overall team member experience, as team members must switch contexts as they jump from tool to tool.
On the opposite extreme are software development workflow products, including many products that fall into the Value Stream Management (VSM) category.
VSM products like Planview’s Tasktop or ConnectALL empower software development teams to align their work with the important business metrics that drive the software development effort – a solid value proposition to be sure.
To achieve this goal, VSM products tend to be prescriptive. Organizations use them because they want a tool that provides recommended workflows that will ideally steer teams to build software in particular ways.
For such tools, prescriptive is often at odds with collaborative. Unlike VSM tools, a collaboration tool will support the team however it wishes to work.
The only constraints you’d expect from an ideal software development collaboration tool would be security and compliance guiderails. Other than such enterprise-centric requirements, however, the team should drive the usage of the tool, rather than the tool prescribing specific tasks or activities for the team.
Goldilocks and Digital Workflows
The most effective software development collaboration tool, as the fairy tale would suggest, is somewhere in the middle between these two extremes.
What teams really want is collaboration that maintains the software development context, combined with workflows that support the team’s need to collaborate on day-to-day decisions rather than prescribing particular courses of action.
We call such workflows digital workflows. Digital is an overused term, and we don’t mean simply leveraging digital technologies – every workflow tool does that.
Instead, we mean digital in the sense of digital transformation: a fundamental shift from siloed organizational and software structures to and end-to-end, human-first organizational model.
For most digital transformations, the humans in question are customers (and in some cases, employees). For the purposes of digital software development workflows, those humans are members of the software development team.
A digital workflow, therefore, is team-driven workflow that supports collaboration needs while maintaining the software development context that such teams require from their tooling.
Mattermost: Porridge that is ‘Just Right’
This careful balance between prescriptive workflows and general-purpose collaboration tools is precisely what Mattermost had in mind when it built its platform.
Mattermost’s starting point is the software development teams who use its tooling, rather than separate tools that risk losing the software development context.
Team members interact collaboratively with the channels, playbooks, and boards that make up the Mattermost platform at every step in the software development process.
Instead of requiring users to jump from one tool to another, Mattermost helps teams align their tools and processes across the software development lifecycle within the same user interface.
The platform combines team messaging, project management, and workflow orchestration into a seamless workspace that eliminates context switching while fostering collaboration.
Mattermost also provides visibility to all team members across this lifecycle, a single source of truth that maintains context as teams collaborate.
With Mattermost, teams are able to take the initiative on building and orchestrating scalable digital workflows that combine team communication, task management, and prescribed processes – where in this case, the prescription in question is team-driven, not tool-driven.
All members of the software development team – developers, testers, DevOps engineers, UI specialists, etc. – all have a common collaborative workspace that provides the development context they need to work together efficiently and align their efforts with the goals of each initiative.
The Intellyx Take
Conway’s Law – which is more of an observation than a law – essentially states that software structures will follow the pattern of organizational structures, and vice versa.
In other words, a siloed organization will find that each of its organizational units will have its own software – and implementing several disparate software packages will inevitably create siloed organizations around each package.
Modern software development practices follow the converse of Conway’s Law. We require end-to-end software that supports hybrid business needs, and thus we must assemble and support cross-functional teams in order to build and support such software.
Digital transformation, in fact, requires this sort of end-to-end, software-empowered and customer-led thinking.
By achieving a happy medium between prescriptive workflow tools and general-purpose collaboration platforms, Mattermost has delivered a software development collaboration platform that teams can use to achieve the goals of modern software development, and by extension, digital transformation as well.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Mattermost is an Intellyx customer, and ConnectALL is a former Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer. Intellyx retains final editorial control of this article. Image credit: public domain.
