{"id":17985,"date":"2016-10-03T00:00:57","date_gmt":"2016-10-03T00:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fullcontact.com\/?p=17985"},"modified":"2020-03-23T17:12:08","modified_gmt":"2020-03-23T17:12:08","slug":"follow-the-smells-be-agile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fullcontact.com\/blog\/engineering\/follow-the-smells-be-agile\/","title":{"rendered":"Follow The Smells \/ Be Agile"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the years I\u2019ve bounced around quite a bit in the engineering world; I\u2019ve found myself actively developing applications on the front-end, middleware, platform, and even munging around in data warehouses. I guess you could call me a \u201cfull-stack\u201d engineer.<\/p>\n

Recently, I had an excellent opportunity to be the tech-lead for a rewrite into FullContact<\/a>\u2019s new web-platform dubbed Redboat<\/a>. During the stretch, I stumbled across a \u201cCode Smell\u201d while digging around the code of an upcoming feature.<\/p>\n

In Software Engineering, the term \u201cCode Smell\u201d implies something is fundamentally wrong with code, but you\u2019re not quite sure what it is. Typically an experienced engineer will sense the smell, then follow it until the underlying cause is addressed.<\/p>\n

What was particularly interesting about this smell, was the fact that it became apparent that the code itself didn\u2019t smell. In fact, I came to the conclusion that this code shouldn\u2019t be written at all. The design \/ ux smelled. With no buy-in necessary; The Designer, Product Manager and I came to the same conclusion that the feature would fit nicely within an already awesome part of our product.<\/p>\n

This was a big milestone for Redboat<\/a>. It signaled to me that the Engineering, Design and Product had started to fit well enough together that \u201cSmells\u201d in one aspect of the application could signal issues to others.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d never found myself having such a strong capability to detect underlying issues with an application and act on them. I found myself wondering, what the hell happened?<\/p>\n

A friend recently linked me to this excellent \/ controversial talk<\/a> by Marty Cagan (Great Engineering, Failed Product). The talk surfaced a lot of my career-long frustrations as an Engineer. Marty also led me to the answer of the question above, what the hell happened during Redboat<\/a>\u2026<\/p>\n