Software Development is just like Soccer ⚽️
About Software Development Organizations and Football Clubs
This past November 6th I took a friend to see the second game of NYC FC vs Toronto in the Yankee Stadium. The NYC needed to win 3–0 to get to the next round of Playoffs. They lost 5–0; at least 3 goals were clearly a defense mistake.
Somewhere during our way back home I realized that there are so many similarities between soccer and software development. The following points summarize my analogy:
- Team of 11 in-field players (hands-on engineers) .
- In-field team follows a strategy from a coach (managers) .
- There is a final score match (deliverable software) as a result of playing such a match (development time).
- Fans must be pleased to keep up the business (clients).
- The players play with a ball, in a field and weather as factors that can make them win or lose (technology).
- Fans want to see their team win and see their favorite players in action (requirements).
- The team must score (successful releases) more times than the opposite team (unsuccessful releases) to win the match. The best result is when during the match the opposite team does not score and your team scores at least once.
- During a match there is a referee (third party audit) that will let you know if you did something wrong during the match; ideally the referee is always neutral and does not influences the match result.
The Team
Lets zoom-in into the in-field team. We can divide the type of players in three groups: offense (Developers), defense (QA) and goal keeper (DevOps). Take one of them away, don’t invest on one of them or be weak in one of them and you will probably lose.
All teams have a captain (Technical Leader). In my opinion, the captain of a team is not always the most experienced and best player, but a balance between experience and leadership. Here my examples of bad, fair and good examples:
- There are many bad examples. One might be Luis Chilavert. Being the best of the team, or even the world, does not mean that you have the skills to lead a team. Or Cuauhtémoc Blanco, and all his controversial moments he lived outside the field; putting himself before the team, every time.
- I will use Rafael Marquez as a fair example on what a captain can be. He has talent and fairly good leader skills. Until he gets upset and frustrated. Probably he is the first in the team to give up when the match is not going well for the team. Specially when he plays in National Mexican Team.
- And let’s talk about Franz Beckenbauer, Steven Gerard, Paolo Maldini, Ronaldinho and Carles Puyol as the best examples of what does being a good captain means. Leading by example and always maintaining the head in the game. Even being capable of boost up the morale of the team by keeping up with the “have fun” philosophy, and win.
The Management
Oh the management... Loved when the team gives results, hated and guilty when they don’t. We have seen many clubs fall because the management, we have seen many clubs rise because the management. Lets talk about some examples:
- Jorge Vergara (Chivas) and Silvio Berlusconi (A.C. Milan), two examples of what happens when management puts their own agenda first: teams start losing game after game (unsuccessful releases) leaving the fans (clients) unhappy, making the team (hands-on engineers) frustrated and probably angry. Only the hard-core fans will keep it up with the team. Maybe different management strategies worked perfectly and they didn’t lose money, but if your success metric is the number of fans in the local games (clients signing contracts), probably there were times when things were pretty bad for these clubs.
- Andrea Agnelli (Juventus) and Jesús Martínez Patiño (Pachuca), making aside how they got their teams, I want to use them as example on how commitment from management team to the club can change the course from a unsuccessful club to a winning club. Motivation, pressure, group, delegation and discipline, all just in the right amount, with the right force is not easy. These guys have done a remarkable job.
The match strategy
There are matches (software projects) more difficult and complex than others. There are tournaments bigger than others. There is more money involved in some tournaments than others.
There is more than strategy that will make the team win a match. There are pure offensive teams (more development, little QA), there are pure defensive teams (exhaustive QA), there are teams that like to start the play from the goal and keep passing the ball until they score (inclusive QA).
In my experience, teams (hands-on engineers) have more odds of being successful in a match (software projects) when the defense (QA) is included in the offensive play. The ability to change, prepare and react to different matches makes a difference too. The Pep Guardiola era in Barcelona FC exemplifies my point.
Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images
Why does my club keeps losing?
Getting to the root cause of what is going bad in a team is always a hard thing to do. It will depend on the role you play when doing the analysis. Are you the client? A player? A manager? Different roles, different perspectives, different root causes, different possible solutions.
There can be a lot of reasons why a team keeps losing match after match. Some of them are:
1 The team is not good enough to score. The team might be leading with stats numbers: ball possession time, shots to goal, corner kicks, code coverage, team velocity, etc. Statistics numbers do not win a match, goals do. Successful production deployments do. It is simple, to win you need to score. No score, no win. Sometimes the offense does not look good because it lacks confidence, because the strategy is not clear, because the star player is not in the best moment and the strategy turns around the player.
2 The management team does not care about the in-field team. We have discussed some examples in a section above. But let me highlight that the commitment of the management team is as important as the players in field. Support from management then translates to confidence. Confidence wins matches.
3 The team is playing in a different type of environment (ground, stadium, weather, rules) and is not embracing change. There was a time in Chivas when they decided to change the natural grass to synthetic grass, mainly to reduce the field maintenance cost. Changing technology will cost, and can be bad if the team is not willing to learn a new technology or does not have the skills. Its arguably if the reason why Chivas started doing bad the seasons after changing the grass was influenced by the change on the type of grass, but is well known that the coaches are worried that the conditions of the field that is being visited will affect the final result. Foot note: Chivas at the end decided to bring natural grass back.
My favorite two reasons why a team keeps losing
From a third-party point of view, when analyzing what is going wrong with a team, I find this two reasons why a team lose over and over again frequently. I have seen these situations in both soccer and software projects:
1 The team is playing in the Champions League with “B team” (junior engineers). Have you ever seen a team making it to the Champions League and not playing the tournament with their “A team” (seniors engineers)? No. They use the best team they have in the biggest tournament. Probably a mix from the best from A team and the best of B team as backup, but definitively not entirely B team. Winning the Champions League is not cheap, it is expensive. Developing that complex software you have in mind is expensive. Maybe more expensive than you expected. Yes, there have been occasions where a cheap team with less experience puts all the heart and effort and wins big tournaments. But, the odds of that happening every time is low.
2 The team Defense is not in the game. Remember BRA-GER match in the semifinals of Rio’s World Cup? I will summarize it for you. Brazil lost in the game 1–7. Thomas Müller scored the first goal from a kick from corner. During the first half Germany scored 5 times. German players said later that they knew that Brazil was cracking up and they decided not to keep scoring, after all they were playing against the host of the World Cup and they did not want to humiliate them. If you remember the match as I do, you will remember that there were times when Brazilian defense just let German players pass the ball inside the area and score. It kind of felt like the defense was there, but they were not playing the same match; they were not playing their best. For the second half of the match other factors can be discussed because by the end the morale of the Brazilian team was devastated. It all started with a bad defense strategy, bad defense day.
Here is a video if you want to remember that epic match; you can see from minute 2 of the video how the Brazilian defense starts struggling goal after goal.
Special thanks to Checo González for helping me with fact check, discussing with me this piece and putting some effort in explaining me his vision. And a honorific mention to my dad and husband that keep me close to soccer in life.
Sawyer Effect is a company that plays as a team and loves soccer as well as software development. We have goal keepers, defense and offensive players that will like to help you improve your team. Contact us, work with us. Play ⚽️ with us .
