Process and culture

Process is a skeleton. Culture is the muscles that attach to that skeleton.

Without muscles to move it, the skeleton is inert and useless.

Without a skeleton to attach to, the muscles are an amorphous and undirected mass.

It is easy to assume that an organisation lacking in process will be fixed simply by the addition of and adherence to that process. I made that assumption, but it turns out to be wrong. Process needs to be introduced in tandem with a concerted initiative to evolve the culture such that the process becomes embedded within the culture.

I've spoken about code review before. Code review was one of my favourite things about working as a software engineer at Google. When I joined Flare, there was no code review, so I thought the fix was easy: introduce code review! And I did. But although this was necessary, it turned out not to be sufficient.

Code reviews felt more like a rubber stamp than robust forums for discussion and upholding the values and norms of software quality. We had the skeleton, but without the muscle code review seemed more like an impediment than something really valuable. Only with a lot of hard work alongside the team have we started to develop a culture of code review. The stronger the culture, the more value we get.