RFC driven development

Life without RFCs

Quoted from a blog post about the ride-sharing app Ride:1

In the process of building our apps, I received a private Slack message from “a not very happy front-end engineer,” who asked:

Why was the data dashboard built using React if our front-end stack is based on Ember?

This made me quickly realize a few important things I shouldn’t have missed:

  • I didn’t know we had added a new tool to our stack.

  • Other team members—who should’ve known about it—didn’t know either.

  • Someone made an important decision on behalf of our entire team, but the team wasn’t included in it.

  • No one, including myself, appreciated the surprise.

Benefits

  • Plan ahead before jumping into implementing in code.

  • Higer level design agreed upon beforehand so it’s not discussed in the code PRs.

  • Can forward RFCs to stakeholders so they can voice their concerns.

  • Anyone with a GitHub account is free to review the RFCs.

  • Consider more perspectives. For a backend change a frontender may comment on the API design, or a QA may comment on how the performance should be asserted in the tests, a DBA may comment on the DB changes, and so on.

  • Coordinate large teams, letting everyone know what decisions are made and the possibility to object, without needing tons of meetings.

  • Inclusion in descisions leads to increased responsibility. Team usually gets a higher sense of purpose in their tasks.

  • Question “Why wasn’t I consulted about X?” becomes more rare. A progress managers tend to enjoy.

  • Developers, CTOs, or other roles can participate at the level of abstraction that suits them, to delegate minute decisions to others and only review the “bigger picture”-affecting RFCs. This leads to people not needing to keep the entire system in their head, while still being able to participate in a meaningful way.

References

  1. J. Pablo Buritica (11 Sep 2017), 6 lessons on using technical RFCs as a management tool, opensource.com https://opensource.com/article/17/9/6-lessons-rfcs

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