I’m a swe at an automotive company, and am working on an internal app, with one other developer. Our boss is at the same time the product owner / manager, and I’m struggling to understand how I feel about the team dynamics, given that we don’t really have any set processes, but essentially work on whatever is currently prioritized.
- We are both juniors, fresh from university
- We don’t have any sort CI/CD pipeline, we push to Git and deploy via Github Actions
- One of us (me) focuses on doing the UI, UX + Frontend design, whereas the other does Backend.
- We don’t do Jira, our system tends to be to work on things, show him our progress and he provides his input
- This input can however change the direction of the feature meeting after meeting.
- We are responsible for making everything work - so far it more or less has, as we’ve successfully piloted and launched to users, but it is beginning to feel like a house of cards
- We are also working on other responsibilities, (we are the data analytics / digitalization) team. I also have an intern for the side-topics, though it does take a lot of capacity from my day work.
Recently, I’ve noticed that as the project complexity grows, me and the other dev have had communication difficulties (I think he is a great dev, but the pressure and lack of documenting due to the output expectations leads to me forgetting information about endpoint quirks, etc): we don’t have a set system for documenting things in place, we use our Teams chat but I feel like we can do much better.
Is this situation normal? Would love to hear your opinions / tips on how to navigate this, as it has definitely taken a toll on my mental health recently.
No, but it's not as rare as it should be.
You and the other dev need to sit down together and work out a development process that works for the two of you, and stick with it. And put that process in writing. That process should address the flaws in the way you are doing the work now. Management doesn't have to be involved (or even aware) of this.
Maybe start with developing the minimum requirements for a work unit to be considered "complete" and incorporated into the product. Documentation should be one of those requirements.
Basically, you're a team (of two, but a team nonetheless) and need to be on the same page. Get on that page.