Before DevBreak is a series of live, online, tech talks. Each session features a senior tech expert from an innovative company, who demonstrates how they solved major programming challenges in their business. This series is part of our 2-day festival experience DevBreak.
This edition of Before DevBreak takes a closer look at innovative solutions to common problems that arise in software development, especially the tricky issue of delivering on time. In this talk, Guillaume Maron co-founder and VP of Engineering at Dashlane tells us about the feature development cycle (FDC) at Dashlane.
Does this sound familiar? A development project is due in February. The engineering team reports that, actually, the delivery date is more likely to be in April. Come the end of March, they adjust that to "not before July".
Dashlane assists clients to securely control digital identity management. When they underwent exponential growth making teams larger and further apart, they discovered that oral communication does not scale and that delivery dates could be fantasies. Dashlane responded by adapting the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) to their own needs. Their FDC:
Innovations included in Dashlane's bespoke SDLC include:
This allows the marketing team to help define scope with the focus they bring, such as:
By sidelining any components that lacked the data to allow informed estimates to be produced, into their own phase, the accuracy of phase estimates improved — yes Sherlock!
Lessons learned at Dashlane included some harsh realities about the potential cost of UI alterations. By adding a review cycle to any proposed UI development, more experienced colleagues identify generic components that may be reused or optimize the use of existing libraries.
It is clear that our presenter is speaking from a base of solid experience. And, part of that comes across from the commitment to the apparent cost of their FDC. Guillaume is sanguine, even though their FDC may add 1 additional week to a 1-week project.
After all, the automation tests can be leveraged for regression testing. That clear documentation, housed in a logical location in Confluence, allows new team members to understand and develop the product with far greater efficiency. Yes, the cost of failing to document is perhaps harder to estimate than the cost of doing the documentation — that does not mean that the investment fails to see a good ROI.
Interested to learn about the 6 pillars that make up Dashlane's FDC? Watch the full talk here.
Dashlane are recruiting tech profiles on talent.io, be sure to sign up to receive the best offers.
DevBreak is a 2-day tech festival organised by talent.io, Europe's leading selective recruitment platform which has raised over €10m and is over 170 employees strong. We help great companies build great tech teams, in the simplest way: selected companies apply directly to vetted candidates. We cover most tech roles (software engineers, data scientists, product managers, DevOps engineers, CTOs). Our platform is open to permanent positions as well as freelance assignments, both on-site and remote.
