It doesn’t matter whether you use Waterfall or Scrum, or XP, or any other methodology; there are three and only three gates in the process of creating software.
The first is the “Idea” gate. At this stage what we’re trying to do is to understand if we should actually build the thing that we’re talking about. It doesn’t matter at this stage how we’re going to build it, or deploy it, or test it but it does matter that we know we’ve got a marketfor it, a budget to build it and a rough idea of how long this should take. The key phrase here is “Are we building the right thing?”, if no one can answer that question then the Idea should not progress.
The second gate is the “Technology” gate. This is where Ideas turn into actionable outcomes, or a sketch on a whiteboard starts to become code. This gate is where the architects sit, the lead developers, testers, business analysts and the project managers. It concerns itself with the delivery of the thing, and asks the critical questions “Are we building this thing right?”. Especially when the thing itself is brand new, we might visit this gate more than once.
The last gate is the “Quality” gate. It’s often the first gate to become formalised within an organisation as it’s at the last point before “Production” and so is the last opportunity to ask “Have we built this thing the right way?”. Change Managers and Testers inhabit this space, along with Operational roles, and the occasional Developer.
So, three gates. Easy right?
Well, not exactly. Organisations make this more complicated. At one end of the spectrum you have early stage startups. They may just have a founder, or founders, who do all the work, make all the decisions and are busy trying things out on their friends and families.
On the other hand, you have the big multinationals; these behemoths have multiple layers of governance and a “thing” may have to jump through multiple hoops, with different stakeholders, to get from zero to release.
As organisations move from small to large, or from larger to smaller, the processes that support these three gates change. That’s not just a “could” or even a “should”, these processes must change otherwise the end-to-end process runs into terminal problems.
These problems manifest themselves in lots of different ways, and for many different reasons. But it all comes back to these three gates.
We can help. If you want to examine your end to end governance process or talk about how you could tweak your existing process to meet performance or delivery objectives then please get in touch.
Photo credit: "art of dirty gate" by EVIL EMRE is licensed under CC BY 2.0
