How and When to Incorporate New Software Tools into Your Team
If your company or team is moving along at a steady pace, completing tasks on time, and generally achieving the goals being laid out, it can be easy to stay the course and just assume that whatever you’re doing is correct and should continue.
Change isn’t always necessary—or even good, for that matter—but when is it actually the right time to incorporate a new tool, language, or piece of technology that might be taking the market by storm into your business? How do you identify the risks and whether or not the possible rewards are worth the potential pitfalls?
One of the most important first steps is taking the temperature of the people you work with. Sure, if you’re in a position of power, you can brute force a new technology or tool and determine it’s the right thing to do without consulting anyone else.
However, even if you can’t get each individual person you work with on board, it’s critical to at least have the conversation in order to communicate why you might, for example, feel like it’s time to move away from Objective-C to instead put your money on Swift.
Continuing on this same track—while still using Swift vs. Objective-C as a template—presenting your case through your own independent research, as well as research done by other businesses, can help paint a clearer picture of the risks and rewards. InfoWorld argues that Swift is easier to read and maintain and requires less code than the competition. Additionally, Swift is said to be safer, and if your research matches what this and other sources find, convincing your team that it’s time to adopt something new will be easier.
The Department of Energy has its own unique software development risk assessment, and while it might not be an exact science that works for your situation, it can go a long way toward laying out issues and roadblocks that haven’t yet crossed your mind. “Risks associated with any conversions of existing data required before implementation of a new system” is just a single example of what the assessment poses.
No matter how you look at it, there will be risks involved when using a new tool or language. Ellen Shapiro, Director of iOS Engineering at Vokal, sees where people could get worried but also understands the nature of programmers and their desire to just do things better than they’re currently being done.
“Programmers, by their nature, are always interested in ‘Is there a better way to slice this bread?’ These new tools and technologies, a lot of them have this promise that hey we're going to actually do a thing that's been difficult and make your job easier,” she told StickyMinds. “That's something that's real tempting to a lot of engineers. It's something where trying to weigh the promise of what these new opportunities are promising versus the risks of moving to these new technologies, is always a real difficult thing to do.”
