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Related: What is the unit of work for software development? It's not tasks or lines of code or bugs closed - that's the outcome of the work, or the work produc
by csours 3y ago
Related: What is the unit of work for software development?
It's not tasks or lines of code or bugs closed - that's the outcome of the work, or the work product.
What is a unit of work? I invite you to come up with your own answer before reading mine.
I think the unit of work for software development is learn and try. Learn something, try it. Learn something, try it. It's a cycle, so its also try something, learn (that it doesn't work), try something else, repeat.
I think this is an important thing to coach junior developers on - I've seen many junior developers try something, and the code still doesn't work, so they revert the thing they tried, without knowing or evaluating whether they got closer to the desired result.
So it's not try something and see if it worked, it's try something and determine the state of the system.
- dfee 3y agoAs you approach this answer from a functional programming perspective, I imagine a “unit of work” becomes intuitive: something that provides a correct result for its inputs. Integration of these is also a unit of work. In my mind, it’s also a requirement to be tested, either via true unit testing (generally), or if logical, offloading to the compiler to statically provide coverage. This doesn’t cover aligning work with the problem statement, or design. But that’s art. (Edit: I’m describing a function in paragraph 1, and a pure function is especially easy to digest as the ideal candidate for a UOW).
- csours 3y agoI think this is also an interesting approach, I like it.