Setup your development team for success

Software changes all the time and relies on other software that's also ever-changing. Your team consists of different people who write code in different ways.

Even in the best-case scenario, where your team is made of seasoned software engineers who know the best practices and have a well-rounded background in computer science, it's incredibly challenging to keep things structured and consistently produce quality work.

The reality is usually very different. Most teams are multidisciplinary, with a mix of software engineers, data scientists, researchers and designers. Not everyone has the knowledge that's needed to work on complex software and make good software design decisions. If you let your team work on software without providing them with the knowledge to do this properly, it's a recipe for disaster.

Here are a few things I often hear inexperienced software developers say:

• "I have deadlines, so I don't have time to write software tests."
• "I'm not going to spend a lot of effort refactoring and improving my code. I just need my code to work."
• "We can improve our software later when our projects are done and we have more time." (Spoiler alert: this will never happen!)

When a team has this mindset, I can guarantee that their code will become really hard to manage, really soon. I've been there.

And if your team does more than just write scripts that are used internally, but you also host software applications in the cloud, things just got a lot more complex. You need to make sure that maintaining and deploying your software is easy, that you're not spending a ton of money on cloud resources you don't need. And on top of that: you need to be really serious about security because data leaks can be business killers.

What happens if you don't take action?

You'll end up with spaghetti code that nobody dares to touch because every change you make seems to break everything and results in a cascade of other problems. Your code will contain more and more bugs that cost your team an increasing amount of time to fix. And hiring extra people only makes problems worse since you add yet another person to your team, while not addressing what really causes the problem.

If you let things fester, your cloud costs will go through the roof and you'll start missing deadlines. Your software will have a ton of bugs and other problems. Your customers will be extremely unhappy. If your team works with data, there will be errors in the outcome that may have severe consequences since your business takes decisions based on wrong information. Or even worse: your customers' data could end up on the street because you didn't put the right protections in place. If you're not careful, you'll endanger your entire company's existence.