Driving Cultural Change Through Software Choices
By: Camille Fournier
Tags: Culture, Change, Software Development

This tweet got me thinking about change, and how software engineers (and especially, Platform teams) can drive cultural change throughout companies.

First, let’s take the question. You want to change the engineering values that your company is expressing. You don’t just want to create a heavyweight process (your checkin fails if you don’t reach X code coverage, for example), you want engineers to start to value these things enough that they don’t need a process to enforce them.

I’ve driven and watched culture change happen enough times to know how to do it from the position of senior leadership. You change what you reward and focus on, and repeat that change enough that people will start to naturally change their perspective (or, sometimes, leave). If you go from putting all of your focus and attention on new projects and turn your prioritization to stability, taking the time to praise teams who improve their stability, promoting engineers who complete projects that are related to stabilization, and crucially, set prioritized goals for your teams to work on stability, your culture will change from prioritizing new projects to prioritizing stability.

This is a powerful force, but it is slow, and what’s worse, it can have negative consequences. You don’t want teams who are afraid to do new things for fear that they will be punished for a lack of stability, for example. And if you overcorrect for a perceived cultural gap, you can end up chasing away otherwise great engineers who believe that their skills are no longer wanted or valued because they no longer have an important skill set. So trying to make your teams change their technology approaches purely via a cultural focus is not always the best approach.

There is another lever that is available, however, particularly to platform developers. And that is the lever of product features.

I’ve never met an engineer who didn’t occasionally copy-paste-modify some code. One of my earliest professional software lessons was that when you set up a codebase full of tests, other engineers are likely to write tests for their code because there will be lots of examples for how to test. This generalizes to the observation that people are most likely to take an existing thing and tweak it into a new thing that does what they need, and in the process they will take the good and bad from that existing thing. So if you want them to follow a best practice, put it in their starting templates.

Take building a service. If you start with nothing but a system that runs a simple web server, you might go through the effort to also set up metrics and monitoring and healthchecks, but you might also feel like you’re busy and you just want to get the code that you absolutely must write done. On the other hand, when you start with a service framework that is already set up with metrics and monitoring and healthchecks, you’re more likely to do a little bit of work to make those at least mildly useful. This was one of the insights that Dropwizard gave me back in the day: pre-integration of stuff that you really need to run a service well means that your services are better from day one.

Platform developers these days get this. Your infrastructure software now comes out of the box with observability hooks built in. We’re all probably more attuned to basics of creating reliable software now because our tools push it on us from the get-go, so there’s no cultural revolution necessary.

We can go further than observability. Security can be a process, or a cultural value, but you can also go quite far by providing tools and platforms that have good security practices baked in to them, so that you’re not relying on the good citizenship of your development team. Testing is often hampered by the overhead of running tests, and investment into infrastructure that makes tests easy and fast to run is important to supporting a culture of software quality validation.

All of this is to say that developers have more power than they imagine to change the engineering culture around them. As you build software that others will use or that your peers will work on, are you making it easy for them to do the right thing? If you build platforms, bake in easy integrations for the software values you want to see. If you’re in the position to choose new tools, pick ones that support the standards you want taken seriously. And as you write code, make it easy for others who will copy-paste what you’ve done to then do the right thing.

Enjoy this post? You might like my book, The Manager’s Path, available on Amazon and Safari Online!