Unfortunately I see this ‘Architecture by CV‘ or ‘Resume driven development‘ as Cory has called it kind of thing all the time.
An app will basically become a developers ‘pattern playground‘.
In the worst cases you’ll literally see instances of almost every pattern you can think of forced into it because the developer wants to learn them or wants to put them on their CV. The patterns provide solutions to problems… which the app doesn’t have.
It’s so very common 😥 … and is one of the main causes of over-architecting I see. Of course the other big cause of over-architecting is developers trying to predict the future and so they put in layers and layers of extra stuff ‘just in case’ / ‘what happens if’ etc.
Do you come across resume driven development often?
I would love to know your experiences with it.
BUT … do give developers an outlet to try new things
I guess it’s important to say that you do need to give developers a outlet to try new things somehow in the day job.
There’s a danger of stifling innovation or hitting a developers motivation and passion for the job if they could never try new things out. God knows it’s hard enough to get new staff in so retention has to be the name of the game..
… BUT it’s about finding the correct forum for it…
Community standups can be good where developers get to look into ‘cool’ stuff and present to the other devs, time to do certifications etc. Inhouse/external training, building reference architectures which aren’t tied to specific projects can be a good one too if time allows. Any other ideas?
