Today I read a blog from Sean McCown that encourages developers to be professionals when it comes to interacting with a database. In a nut shell, (Go read his blog for more) he says that coders should not write code a specific way to make the DBA happy. They should write the code that way because it is right way to access a database.
I appreciate Sean’s sentiment and would like to take that a bit further. This paradigm should be applied to all disciplines surrounding an application developer. Whether it be the DBA, the QA analyst, the Build Engineer or the Automation Engineer. They all have the “right” way to access or to test or to automate. These are not because they want to make things hard for the app dev, no. It is because each discipline has specific knowledge about how their systems work the best.
Just as a DBA can say this way to code will retrieve the data you want faster and more reliably than the other way, an Automation Engineer can and should say, coding this way will make the automation work more efficiently and have a higher quality return rate.
A coder will have a greater understanding of where efficiencies can be gained in his application if he can reach out to these disciplines and understand the “whys” instead of just making someone happy.
Till next time…
