What is Moldable Development?

Ever heard about this one? Today developers spend more than half of their time to understand what's going on with the system, what it does? This is one of the most expensive part of developing a software. As per moldable development, we can provide a summary of the system to the developers so that they can quickly decide what to do as a next step, what should be the roadmap. Rather than going through the codebase manually, this mentioned method decreases the effort and time to move to next step. Well, sounds like data science but not for data, for the software itself. Here are few points to ponder :-

• To provide the devs better information we have to develop multiple customized tools at multiple steps of the software development journey. And building many tools like this needs and proper environment at very less expense.

• This environment itself can contain numerous tools inside it, it should provide better conditions to build tools inside it for any many languages, it should be used as a knowledge management system too.

• This idea may turn into a competitive advantage down in the line for many companies. It's like creating a technical storyteller whose content can be narratives for devs, can act as pitch, public marketing materials too.

• It should understand the contextual details of one system, among multiple systems too and should be able to build visuals or queries or stories on the go automatically on any of the stuffs as in : source code, logs, incident reports, bugs, data in database etc. All these should be so simple that even non-technical people should grasp the summary very quick.

• Moldable development can the reason to solve an issue with the existing systems or can be used to find out something that can give an competitive advantage(similar to data science) no matter wether the system in a legacy system or modern async distributed system.

So, we can apply moldable development almost everywhere during the development. Only con that arises at this moment is practice of this type of method. Not everyone would agree on this unless until they see the results from someone else. And to adapt this, we may need some time(maybe 5-10 years). The point here budget is already allocated, now how do you want to use it? By reading code all the way or just watching the graphs and maps?

The facilitator and the stakeholders will be the two key components in the adaption of it. The facilitator is similar to data science who will build the tools to showcase the patterns and the stakeholders will be the ones who will be pointing how the issues. Who can be a stakeholder? Almost everyone can be. To see the real value of the it, people have use it's outputs to take decisions in major projects. There exists a tool which is specifically built for Moldable Development. It is now at the stage where once Notion used to be after it's lunch. Check this : Glamorous Toolkit

This area is like never discovered and there is a long way to go.

Thanks for reading up to here😊

Source - InfoQ Article