Working with SAFe and Microservices: Learnings from Developers

As developers, the prospect of working for a big company might bring about feelings of oppression, rather than opportunity. Envisaging endless team syncs, pointless meetings and processes wrapped up in bureaucracy inside a set of procedures. It’s easy to imagine why some are put off. For many though, the fear comes from the thought of being lost in a corporate structure where input is not valued, and skills are wasted.

But every day, as developer concepts become further rooted into corporate behaviors, the line between the two worlds continues to blur. Products are no longer dreamed up in product silos, but from agile teams made up of a diverse cross section of a company. Marketing has dropped drip campaigns in favor of A/B testing, rapid iterations of messaging and data-driven analytics. Big companies no longer mean old school thinking, but fast-changing, inclusive places to really make an impact and be heard. 

Working within the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) with an agile architecture of microservices helps us to do our jobs, but the learnings we’d like to share in this article are universal. An organization may not require the SAFe methodology, but the experiences and methods of working can be applied to many roles and are based on three fundamental questions every developer should ask themselves. 

How Do I Plan My Day? 

As with any role, a good start for us is knowing that the previous day went well; that the code we wrote meets the standards required for deployment. Before that, our individual microservices teams will meet to discuss immediate priorities. We let one another know what’s top of mind for us, and any issues we might be facing — and we resolve them together before a midday Scrum meeting.

The Scrum meeting involves the Scrum master, product owner and the developer team and gives us a chance to give feedback and dive into the wider challenges or blockers we’re facing with our own tasks. We might be thought of as solitary creatures, but we actually tend to solve problems together. So, while we have ownership of our own tasks, problem solving comes from collaboration.  

Whether working within the agile framework or not, communication is a huge part of our lives. Our advice to developers everywhere is to be vocal about the need to engage within their organizations. And to business IT decision makers, we know that not every firm has the deep pockets to fund a dedicated DevOps team to implement new tools, change culture or break down silos, but there are many communications and open source DevOps tools that boost collaboration and improve workflows — most are well-known to developers. So, give them the chance to explore how they might bring efficiencies to their work. Help them help the business and maybe suggest trialing some new tools. 

How Do I Upskill on the Job?

Developers are problem solvers. We love the opportunity to help each other overcome challenges. Peer-to-peer communication doesn’t just allow us to get back on course quicker, it lets different teams share knowledge and pitch in to solve problems. We don’t mind being transparent with our peers when we face an issue – in fact, we quite like it, as the offshoot of working together often leads to new skills and technical knowledge. 

Learning the interactions between each microservice, for example, helps us map out the architecture and understand how our own work fits into the bigger picture. The more we talk, the more we see where bottlenecks might occur — and the better equipped we are to achieve larger objectives. As we have complete ownership of our services, from initial coding to deployment, it is our duty to ensure our services perform as they should in production. 

This ownership is something all developers should aim for. Even when working in a more rigid waterfall approach, opportunities to collaborate should be seized and encouraged — even if the only payoff is personal development. Implementing a system of peer code reviews, for example, not only delivers more robust releases, it fosters a collaborative mindset.

Do I Need to Be in this Meeting?

Working with SAFe methodology allows the job to be broken down into iterations linked to business objectives. The most significant of these is determined by meetings that occur every four months, where goals are set and roadmaps established to achieve them. Engineering teams then divide up the features that will be passed on to the developer teams, who break them down into two-week sprints. 

The sprints are what the developer teams work to, under direction from the Scrum masters and product owners. Breaking iterations into smaller sprints ensures we have defined goals, which keep meetings and interactions on track (i.e., daily Scrum meetings and bi-weekly sprint meetings). Without this focus, there’s a risk of derailing the prep required to focus on writing and reviewing code. If we need a discussion about certain features, we make sure to identify exactly who needs to be in that meeting. Above all, we’re all about optimizing our time together. The longer we spend away from our desks, the less time we have to perform our core roles. 

Whatever your part in the software development lifecycle, never be afraid of asking the question, “Do I need to be here?�? Your energies may be best used elsewhere.

As you can see, these three questions are critical to developers but can be applied to just about any role in just about any organization. Planning, learning and focusing – seems we’re not so different after all.

This article was co-authored by Tomasz Rumpca, Java developer and team lead at Finastra. Tomasz works on FusionFabric.cloud, Finastra’s open development platform solution. He is passionate about Java-related technologies and building user-friendly software. Outside of work, he enjoys spending time outdoors with his friends and family.