Software products and services. The kind of stuff you find in big organisations like hospitals, government, finance, etc. Nothing the Codex would find remotely interesting.
I do, it's my field too.
Custom software is obviously very susceptible to crunch time, so how did you manage to reach this heavenly enviroment?
We don't make promises we can't keep, which means understanding what we're promising and what we do well enough to be able to make reliable estimates, plus having clear-enough contracts that everybody understands what, for example, a mid-project requirements change actually means.
We had to narrow our focus so we take on projects that build on stuff we already have or already know, get techs involved in sales early enough to sanity-check the offers, and do a lot of work on the contracts. At the same time, relentless focus on code quality, supported by robust QA, which made development way more predictable. This let us make better estimates, which in turn helped sales to make better offers. At some point it created a virtuous circle and things started improving by themselves. Everybody noticed the benefits -- including the customers -- which made working with them easier, which again showed up as benefits in the projects.
At some point it started to 'gel' and suddenly people needed much less management oversight; they were able to figure out what they needed to do their own and ask each other for support when needed, which made everyone both happier and more productive, and started coming up with ways to improve things on their own.
So basically we combine super-strict enforcement of coding standards and code quality with as-free-as-humanly-possible management practices. For example anyone can telecommute whenever they want, we set their own working hours, and have an absolute minimum of mandatory meetings (daily scrum, monthly sprint demo), but there's a
lot of pressure to keep your commits clean. And we only hire people who are able to work in this kind of environment (about half to three-quarters stay on after the trial period; very few tend to leave once past that point).
It was really hard work though, especially in the beginning, and it took... I dunno, 2-3 years to get the ball rolling, and another 2-3 years to really have the benefits kick in, and really required a culture change in the whole company from the CEO down. We're by no means done yet although things have gotten markedly easier over the past couple of years.
