On 02 May, I had the opportunity to return to my alma mater - Rose-Hulman - and speak to a class on Software QA.  It was a great opportunity and discussion spurred by (hopefully funny) war stories and major screwups that I was more than happy to share.

During the discussion, I had the opportunity to speak about our development process here for WhyGoSolo.  The most interesting thing that struck me was a comment I received from the student feedback after:

I thought that Keith had a lot of interesting, informative things to say about his company’s development process.  Of all of the presenters, I think that he is one of the few that has even a semblance of formal development process in a small company setting.  I was intrigued to hear how formal and mature his startup’s development process is – it seems to be a trend that most companies don’t develop a mature process until they have been around for quite a while and wish to receive various industry certifications.

Unfortunately, he's correct.  Most companies don't try to clean up their processes until someone needs to audit them... until there's something else on the line.

What they forget is that there's almost always something on the line. 

Having a formal development process seems like a lot of overhead.  It seems like a lot of extra work...

Until the first time the production database gets dropped.

Or the first time users are locked out of the system.

Or the first time you lose that big opportunity.

Then you and your team are going to stop and consider how you can make it better next time.  It could be as simple as requiring every change to production to be reviewed by a second set of eyes.  it could be as simple as requiring one person to write the database update and someone else to execute it.  It could be as simple as making sure your staging environment gets the review required prior to deployment to production.  The consistency that comes along with a process could be the single most valuable part.

I don't care what your process is: Just get one and get it rolling.

It will never require forms signed in triplicate, filed, lost, buried in peat moss, and filed again... well, almost never.