Meet The Wolf

Every day, Bitovi helps companies build amazing web applications. We’ve come a long way from the early days, when the number of Bitovians could be counted on one hand.

Today, we have over 30 Bitovians working on a number of applications at once.

As our team and number of projects grew, we began seeing several problems arise:

• Knowledge was being lost between project teams. Multiple teams would be solving similar problems without learning from each other.
• The collective learnings from past Bitovi projects were not being efficiently transferred to new projects that newer Bitovi consultants were working on.
• Technical debt — the understandable small sacrifices (neglected tests, smelly code) made in projects in exchange for speed — would sometimes accumulate in projects, threatening their very foundation.

To keep delivering successful applications built the right way, we formed a new role affectionately known as “The Wolf”. Last year, that role was given to Curtis Cummings, one of Bitovi’s most senior consultants.

Curtis is…THE WOLF!

No, not that wolf. THE WOLF!

Wait, no. Not that wolf either. The other Wolf.

There we go. That Wolf.

If you’ve seen Pulp Fiction then you probably remember Harvey Keitel’s character. He cleans up the mess, solves problems and does it with style.

The Wolf is part of every application delivered by Bitovi, but customers rarely see him and they’re not billed for his time. He is providing quality control and a project insurance policy. In fact, when he’s doing his job well, you probably won’t ever see him, since everything is humming along smoothly.

It is rare among software consulting companies that the most experienced consultant is providing unbilled time on projects:

• enforcing best practices,
• making sure the right tools are being used and kept up to date,
• helping manage technical debt
• and lending his experience and assistance.

The result? Amazing applications delivered on time. How boring :)

Enforcing Best Practices

We’ve been building applications for nearly 10 years and we’ve learned a ton in that time. We’ve created a project checklist that covers all of the practices we found that make projects successful. We’ve blogged about the checklist and given talks about it before. The Wolf makes sure every project team routinely reviews the checklist and takes care of any obstacles.

While the checklist deals with running a software project, we also have strong technical opinions on how to build an application that is maintainable. It’s no secret that maintenance is biggest cost item in building a software project so our approach emphasizes this over all else. The Wolf ensures that the applications are built the “Bitovi Way”.

Right Tool for the Job

We’ve codified all the technical lessons we’ve learned in the past 10 years into a set of tools that are all open source. They work great together or as part of an existing stack. We’re constantly improving our tools to adapt to the ever changing technical landscape. The Wolf makes sure each application is running on the latest and greatest Bitovi tech and that bugs and feature requests are prioritized with the open source dev team.

Managing Technical Debt

Even if you don’t know the term, you’ve certainly encountered it. Technical debt are the short-term sacrifices made to code quality in the name of project speed. It’s called debt because you pay interest on this in the form of maintenance costs; as you accumulate technical debt the project becomes costlier to change and if not addressed can completely bankrupt a project.

Accumulating some short-term debt is perfectly reasonable in order to meet tight deadlines, but it’s vitally important that any debt is taken care of as soon as possible. The Wolf helps measure the amount of technical debt in a project, how fast it is being accrued, and makes a plan for dealing with it.

The Proof is in the Pudding

The role has only existed for a few months but has already paid huge, yet quiet dividends, for our projects.

In the future, we’re excited to share his observations that extend our findings on the keys to project success.