Design Reviews, capturing context at speed¶
Description
I've got two simple questions for you, and two upsetting ones.
We'll do the easy ones first. What's the oldest software system that you personally work with regularly, and what does it do? I would have to check GitHub dates, but at Tinder off the top of my head I'd guess our iOS purchase flow, and it provides features in exchange for payment tokens.
Now come the upsetting ones. How does it do that, and why does it do it in that way? Answering these two would take me hours to talk through, and days or possibly weeks to research, and that's assuming all of the information is actually available today (it's not).
Decisions about how to build software are made in environments teeming with context. They are influenced by factors ranging from the current financial state of a company to the personal preferences of the engineer(s) building them. In any given distributed system you may find incomplete features, abandoned migrations, and compromises made that have changed API contracts, but greatly eased integrations. Many, if not all, of these factors may be invisible once code has shipped.
At Tinder some of our teams try to capture this valuable context, as well as share engineering standards and preserve tribal knowledge, via Software Design Reviews. We recently formed a Design Review Working Group to improve this process, as well as to make it more generally available across our engineering teams. In this talk I will share the findings of our research, what we ended up implementing, and what results it has shown in the past 12 months of general availability.
Questions in this talk that others might find informative:
- How did we minimize documenter effort, while improving operational excellence, and optimizing for documentation that remains useful over time?
- How did we alter our design review documentation system to serve the needs of diverse, cross-functional teams?
- How did we build broad consensus across an engineering department with little cross-team structure?
- Conference: Write the Docs Portland
- Year: 2024
