Siloes are for farmers to store grain in. But we've adapted siloes in our organizations. Check this workflow (from a medium size UK company) out:
- Developer writes a feature.
- Developer raises a change request.
- The Change Control board meets, discusses the change, and approves it.
- Developer "hands over' the code by checking into a well-known place in Perforce.
- Release manager gets the change, verifies that all the change information is complete, and attempts to deploy the change to an integration test environment. [let's assume that it works, otherwise your eyes will glaze over]
- A tester (paid by the day) will verify that the functionality works.
- Steps 5 and 6 are repeated in a formal test environment, and then UAT.
- Release manager hands over the code in a well-known place in a filesystem for the systems administrator to deploy.
- Systems administrator deploys the code (assuming that the test environments are realistic and the instructions are up to day).
And the change? Revoking the rights of temporary staff to order lunch on the company intranet. Each handover introduces waste in the form of waiting, miscommunication, errors and plain old overhead. Is this appropriate? I think not. But for millions of us, it's just the way we work. I'd rather the tester and the developer collaborate to write the code and it's automated tests, allow an automated deploy to test environments, and use the same process to get the code into production.
Sadly, most of us are a long way off. So we inhabit the silos.
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