Proactivity In Software Engineering

You have to be proactive! Every newcomer hears this mantra from HR, manager, scrum master, and pretty much everybody from the organization layer. However, it is not always clear what it means and how to bring this proactivity into life. Let us see possible applications and best practices of proactivity in software engineering.

Why Do I Need It?

The proactivity concept defines the way of dealing with different situations using initiative and adaptive approach. It means that a proactive person does not expect the issue or problem to appear. Instead, he/she performs actions in advance to prevent the issues from happening and ensure the best possible outcome.

It may be easier to describe the proactive approach as an antonym to the reactive approach. A reactive person reacts to the events, and so has a minor influence on the flow and situation in general. In contrast, a proactive person tries to predict the events, adjust the flow if needed, and control the situation to achieve set goals.

Agile methodologies became a de facto standard in software engineering, in large part because they use the proactive approach a lot. It is easy to adjust them to almost any project and workflow, while processes in a team remain transparent and predictive. Altogether, they show excellent results in multiple areas and under different circumstances.

Best Practices

There are multiple ways of how the proactive approach can help software engineers, but the best practices mentioned below are the most common and work in almost any situation.

Proactive best practices work best when a team maintains a high level of discipline in all the internal activities. Discipline, as such, improves pretty much every activity and allows a team to perform it better and faster. Disciplined teams also need less attention from the management department.

Overall organization and self-organization of every team member improve internal processes even further by grouping and structuring the tasks. When a team member knows what to do, when to do, and how to do a job, internal processes can be simplified and so take less attention and time to handle.

Another thing that improves the overall flexibility of a process is good communication. Have it, and you do not need to worry about the unknown or unexpected factors that other team members know. Proper organized communication also improves team relationships and allows team members to predict and prevent internal conflicts.

You should check the progress of your project regularly. Such a status update helps to review found issues, address them, and check the status of existing problems. The smaller the period, the easier it is to track the changes and react to them. Agile methodologies implement this best practice in the form of stand-up meetings and retrospectives.

You may use checklists to organize often performed activities, track all the aspects, and be able to react in advance. A well-made checklist covers all the factors that may affect some process or a part of it. You may start from writing down all the issues in your opinion that may happen, check them regularly, and add newly appeared issues to the checklist to prevent them in the future.

And of course, you should use all the best practices of an agile methodology used in your project.

Living In A Flow

As we see, the proactive approach combines overall control of the business processes with a high level of flexibility. No matter if the project is hardware or software related, it is the technical training or just a short analytic session — the proactive approach can generally improve, optimize, and make them more useful.

However, this approach has its drawbacks. High level of organization and discipline may be stressful, constant meetings and talks may lead to mental exhaustion, and too much flexibility may cause frustration of team members. These are known issues. Every team on every project has to deal with them according to an environment and their goals.

In general, proactivity is not only a business concept — you can apply it to every aspect of your life. You can (and you should) use this approach to organize your schedule, spend less time on regular activities, and so have more time for something new and exciting. And you can improve this strategy even further to achieve whatever you want!