When a software product first comes out, we often don’t have a delivery pipeline; we often don’t have a backlog full of juicy features to develop. Sometimes we don’t even have a clue where it’s going. We have an idea of what a customer wants, and we build it.
When the software is in use, we get requests from users. We improve it. We add new parts to it; we integrate it with new interfaces and other pieces of software. For example, let’s improve onboarding using OAuth2 so people can log in with their Google or Facebook credentials.
Almost imperceptibly our software product becomes a bigger software system. Yet we continue to treat it like a single product sitting all by itself.
We don’t think of small changes as ‘changing architecture’. Instead, we think of it as ‘fixing the product’.
So when you consider your backlogs and think about where you want to go next, are you seeing the whole picture? Are you aware of the total pain involved in making those changes? If you don’t know, talk to the operations and support teams.
Don’t guess. Know.