The Tools Don’t Dictate the Outcome

Software is everywhere, helping us do many things we couldn’t do years ago.

Thinking back to the early days with Source Control, VSS (Visual Source Safe) was my first introduction to source control and it looked something like that.

Horrific I know, you should have tried branching with it (I said a prayer each time).

But then we evolved to DevOps, GIT, JIRA, and a denizen of other tools that would help us better manage our outcome for what we were trying to deliver. With those tools came recommendations for how software should be delivered – from agile to waterfall to scrum to SAFE to everything else in between.

We now have all these blueprints and patterns on how to deliver software. So much so that they come with built-in suggestions and recommendations for what “everyone uses”.

But if you spend ten minutes on the forums of all these companies you’ll see, we still deliver a bit differently wherever we go. I have never worked with one company and seen them do it the exact same way.

No one does and there is a reason for that – it’s because all our domains are different, our industries are different, our platforms are different. We are currently in the middle of the NOCODE revolution that will once again how we think and approaches Software Development Lifecycles (it already is).

The point here is – the tools are prescribed guidance – they are ideas on how to implement software but they are not your software, they are not your delivery team, they are not the constraints and costs you need to deliver under.

Don’t let the tools dictate what you are delivering, if you do, what’s going to happen when you switch tools or when your software evolves beyond it.

Do what makes sense, learn lessons outside of the software and implement.

The best thing in all of these Software Delivery applications – they have APIs, you know what that means – we can code anything.