Here's What a Hornet Taught Me About ServiceNow Development

[captainmorgan]

Some of you might know, Stave recently opened our new World Headquarters in San Diego and moved into a new office location in La Jolla.   The office itself is a quaint mid-century modern building, complete with open floor plans and the open beam ceiling and exposed wooden joists common to that architectural period.   Also typical of that period is the lack of air-conditioning, which means we generally leave our windows open to enjoy the breeze from over the sea.

While sitting at my desk this afternoon, I noticed a lone hornet enter and fly around.   This hornet was obviously a scout.   She floated around the ceiling area, near the wooden seems by the beam and investigated every single crevice one by one.   She'd land, crawl into the small opening, and reappear a second later before moving down the line to the next panel.   I'm assuming she was investigating a suitable location for colonial expansion efforts and was looking for an acceptable secure space that would be large enough for the entire hive.

I did have a nervous pause at one point when she spent a noticeably longer amount of time in one particular gap.   That was against the wall that contained a sliding pocket door and since it is hollow, I'm sure there might be enough space for the potential new neighbors.   I was relieved to see her reappear, and then fly away again out the window, presumably to either continue her search (or notify the new residents…)

What I watched our hornet friend do was follow exactly the process we preach that's possible on the ServiceNow platform — requirements gathering and   rapid interactive development and testing.

Our hornet friend was investigating, testing, qualifying, validating, failing fast, and repeating.   It turns out her attempts at real estate investigation mirror the practices of the DevOps world.

I can imagine back at the hive, this hornet received a list of requirements from her supervisors on exactly what was needed in a new hive location.   They probably specified size and capacity, protection features, expansion possibilities, proximity to resources, and a dozen other things that bugs care about.   She accepted those criteria and ventured out to deliver the requirements.

I can also imagine that once a suitable location has been found, the responsibility for constructing the new hive falls to a different category of hornets.   Our friend is trained and effective as a scout.   Other specialist hornets may excel at construction.   We have this exact same schism in the software world when we divide up the functions of design verses delivery, because we have different specialist.   In software we add additional steps for Quality Assurance and User Acceptance Testing generally from separate teams as a best-practice from specialist teams as well.   Hornets, of course, maintain fierce defensive specialists to protect the finalized and occupied hive from danger.

The natural world is full of wonders that we've inadvertently adopted.

Working on Product Management at Stave, I see these exact practices in play as we develop our business applications on the ServiceNow platform and make them available on the ServiceNow Store.   We look for the market need (a new hive is required), investigate if it's possible (fly to the ceiling rafters), perform iterations of designing, building, and testing (search each crevice), certify and deploy the finished app on the Store (build the hive), and then maintain, upgrade, and support our customers using the app (defend the colony).

There's no doubt many more ideas and practices we IT professionals, app developers, and ServiceNow users can learn as we create things in the platform from observing the world around us.   At times, perhaps we need to think as we look up from working in ServiceNow on our screens and take a minute to observe the behaviors of a single hornet.