The Side Effect - Creating Designs without Negatively Impacting Others

As a design lead or architect we often must ensure our designs don’t cause side effects. If we aren’t careful we can negatively impact other applications or services by

• not effectively managing data our application exposes to other sources

• or modifying interfaces

• or even by changing how errors are handled

Now this is in no means an exhaustive list. But when the impacts of our modifications cause failures for others, it’s a failure for our product also, even when our product or application is fully functioning.

It’s important that we coordinate with the teams that use our data letting them know when changes are occurring. There are some simple things we can do ensure we’re all in one accord.

Integration Testing

I’ve said it before, we can often assume some changes are small enough not to require integration testing. However, when we do this we leave ourselves open to the risk of deploying a solution that has negative impacts on others. Even if it’s a simple connectivity test, its worth it to prevent interface issues in the future. Remember, measure twice cut once.

Integrated Project Planning

Project managers, scrum masters, and business analysts should ensure that joint meetings and coordination sessions are held and key line items are entered in all impacted team plans. Be sure to include buffer in case something goes wrong and dates need to be revised.

Risk Management Planning

If a major product release is being deployed ensure the team has a risk management plan in place to ensure there’s a fallback in place for any failures and all systems continue to operate. When a good risk management plan is provided it means the team has put extensive thought in how the deployment impacts others and what can be done to provide minimal outages due to errors. In fact, because this planning is done up front in many cases the risks are avoided and the plan is not needed.

When we aren’t thoughtful about how our deployments impact others we can tarnish our name, the reputation of our teams, and make others leery of working with us. When we are thoughtful, we can help ensure a smooth delivery of our product to production.