5 Things Modern Day Software Development Teams Learn From One Of The Greatest Music Bands — The Beatles
Remote working has led to increased job burnout cases, but Team ClixLogix knows the art of balancing the workload. They code their way out of a hectic day with The Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (probably missing their work buddies) which is the perfect stress-buster for them.
So, if you think: A Day in the Life (of software engineer) can be cumbersome, then we have got you covered! Read this blog post to secure the secret success mantra of The Beatles. A mantra that not only made The Beatles one of the greatest music phenomenon, but also had the ability to catapult any organized software development team to reach the same heights.
Read on and we hope you are ready to learn and adapt these tips as you work with your team.
The Never-Ending Popularity of The Beatles
The Beatles were an iconic and one of the most influential pop-rock band that was formed in 1960 and broke up in 1970. The Beatles, led by key songwriters John Lennon and Paul McCartney, transformed many parts of the music industry by becoming pioneers in recording, songwriting, and creative presentation.
The Beatles’ entry in the United States in 1964 is regarded with kicking off the album era. The popularity of the band can be measured with global accolades: seven Grammy Awards, six Diamond albums, fifteen Ivor Novello Awards, and Academy Award for Best Original Song Score.
Moreover, The Recording Industry Association of America certifies that The Beatles have sold 183 million units in the US, more than any other artist. To keep the essence of the band alive, their fans celebrate Global Beatles Day on June 25.
With the meteoric rise of The Beatles, spiritual reawakening through meditation, and writing 48 songs, there are a gamut of reasons to celebrate them.
One may argue that The Beatles were the natural evolution of rock ’n’ roll, a lineage that began with Elvis Presley. Their captivating stage performance, coupled with their strong work-ethic; collaborative song writing practice registered their names in peoples’ minds. Similarly, collaborative engineering leads to both effectiveness and efficiency in the development and research of software engineering projects.
What is Collaborative Engineering?
Collaborative engineering connects cross-functional roles across an organization to creatively work together with ease for faster innovation. It breaks down all kinds of barriers, adds agility, and brings the team together to make the right decisions faster.
Moreover, with a collaborative approach, any processes within the organization, be it product designing or coding, you can easily capitalize on the great ideas within your teams.
So what cues can Software Engineering leaders take from The Beatles, when it comes to Collaborative Engineering?
Let’s explore. Shall we? Scroll to the next section to decipher it.
The Common Strings Between The Beatles and Software Engineering
The first step in software engineering includes a process of analyzing user requirements. Thereafter, we begin: UI Design, Software Development, and Testing of application being developed. It is similar to creating record-breaking songs; tapping into the fad, penning down the thoughts, recording, and distributing.
So, can all this be done by an individual without collaborating with another professional?
The simple answer is: NO.
Collaborative engineering is widely touted as a way to solve some of the most critical challenges faced by software engineers today. Moreover, completing a complex task requires a shared vision, and collaborative engineering can keep your project delivery deadline worries at bay.
Without further ado, let us look at the top five things modern day software engineers can learn from The Beatles’ work ecosystem {or song writing mechanism}.
1. Leveraging the Power of Creative Collaboration
The adage, two heads is better than one, holds water when we speak about the creative collaboration of The Beatles.
The Beatles had talent to burn. But that talent came to light when the band members worked together. Each band member brought some unique skillset to the table.
On Abbey Road, Paul McCartney created beautiful melodies, George Harrison’s guitar work was top-notch, John Lennon’s songwriting prowess continued to inspire, and Ringo Starr’s drumming skills gave listeners an adrenaline rush. Individually, each talent was impressive. Combined, however, their efforts created a masterpiece that only the four of them could have created. It is a result of collaborative engineering that made their songs iconic and in the top ten of vinyl purchases to date.
2. Flexible Work Arrangements
Try to deviate from rigid working rules and task assignments. You should focus on fueling team collaboration. Another way to skyrocket your team’s productivity: work as per the requirements. For example, The Beatles {John and McCartney} worked according to the song requirements. It allowed the band to infuse perfection into their performance.
3. Listen to Everyone’s Voice
It is indispensable to “Come Together” and work; living in a bubble will only lead to a tragic fall. Considering their success, it wasn’t difficult for McCartney and Lennon to close out the other two Beatles — Harrison and Starr — from all songwriting capacities. But they choose to collaborate their ideas, too. Harrison was a great musician, yet in any event, when there was Lennon and McCartney synthesis being worked out progressively, key choices rose up out of outside the center songwriting group.
Many times, your fellow member or junior might have a fresh and better perspective. Give them a chance to vocalize their ideas. Indubitably, the level of success The Beatles have witnessed would not be possible if they were not open to new ideas and team collaboration.
Make sure to follow the footsteps of The Beatles and adhere to collaborative engineering. It leads to effective brainstorming and collaborating with other engineers will allow you to look at a problem from multiple angles.
4. Collaborative Engineering Makes Project Alignment Easier
Is your development team working in silos? It might appear that team members are achieving goals working independently, but this splits business-critical information across different silos and leads to a drastic loss in productivity.
Think of the time when you bag a new project, requirements are discussed, and suppose a team member misses out to communicate any particular details. The details are now transferred to other departments and tracing the requirement back to the original request is not possible for them. So, if there is a proper collaboration between the planning, engineering, and product management team — there will be more work traceability. Also, it will eliminate working based on assumptions and hunches.
Moreover, it leads to transparent workflow within an organization. Thus, team leads can easily trace what their developers are working on. They know what feature is getting implemented by which developer and who will be suitable for the task.
If you assume, songwriting is equivalent to coding a song, you will be able to connect the dots by imagining how collaboration can simply downstream software development. Still not getting it? Your team can opt to break down complex coding processes into simple solvable chunks.
For instance, the specific ways in which code users will interact with your code. Prepare a blueprint of the proposed classes and their APIs. Implementation of classes according to the user stories. Test classes and then code as it’s an iterative process.
5. Eccentricity + Collaborative Engineering = Impeccable Results
With timeless bangers like Come Together and Hey Jude, it is understandable why The Beatles songs make everyone groove. Sound engineer, Geoff Emerick, in his published memoir, describes how Paul McCartney and John Lennon had a distinct way of producing music.
The working style of Paul can be juxtaposed with John. Paul was meticulous and organized: he methodically noted the lyrics and chord changes. Whereas John lived in chaos, and he preferred to scribble his ideas on a piece of paper and was more thick-skinned. They both had different eccentric qualities but constantly moved forward in impeccable sonic motion.
There is a parallel between developing software and the way The Beatles produced music. John was inclined towards lyrics whereas Paul was towards music composition. Similarly, in software engineering, some would focus on the aesthetic user interface whereas others would look into the functionality development.
Thus, no one developer is more significant than the other; each one’s eccentric qualities can be leveraged to create a software.
6. Not Cracking Under Pressure
The Beatles had their fair share of ups and downs. Their career stretched seven years, with an average of two albums per year, which is incredible, especially considering their intense touring schedule.
Similarly, developers can face difficulties when completing their tasks, and the best way to solve complex issues is by switching to collaborative engineering. They can look for the assistance from other developers and deliver high-quality results.
Tips To Write A Program Like The Beatles Wrote Music
Now, we will look at the Ying-yang dynamics that helped Lennon & McCartney to be a tour de force in the landscape of songwriting. And how the same method you can apply to design software.
- Learning Pair Programming
The binary relationship between Lennon and McCartney enables the raw talent of both to be controlled, filtered, and refined — ultimately creating a dynamic and versatility that fed the band’s success. By bouncing each other’s ideas, exploring new factors and influences, and channeling them via each other, the duo became pioneers of musical innovation.
Similarly, in the world of software development, competition takes the form of ‘pair programming.’ Pair programming allows two engineers to work on the same piece of code simultaneously. The goal is to deliver high-quality results, break down complex tasks, and produce maintainable software faster. For example, while one can handle code-writing, the other one can look for APIs and bugs.
- Only Creative Arguments
Pair programming functions by mitigating one-upmanship with empathy. Competition is a fantastic motivator for people to come up with new ideas. Working together like The Beatles ensures that the core values of — empathy, communication, and trust. These factors are indispensable for making software.
Also, working in pairs aids to eradicate bad habits, transfer knowledge, and develop new skills much faster. It also helps in diversifying a single programmer’s area of expertise: working in pairs can lead to creative arguments but can also help to enhance a developer’s subject knowledge.
- Infuse New Approaches
There was a lot of sonic evolution that happened with The Beatles. Paul McCartney said in an interview with GQ that “we were new and passionate to just repeat the same exact song formula over and over again; that we would have gotten bored”. Their song writing method crossed a broad range of styles and influences over the course of the band’s life.
Collaborative efforts lead to better music and programming outcomes. There is a slew of stylistic approaches and interpretations of the same goal. We witness trends and evolution among programming frameworks, paradigms, libraries, and languages just like musical genres, styles, and instruments.
Many have switched to micro-frontend framework to break down the complex development tasks. Thus, it is crucial to look for new ways to approach a problem rather than only clinging to the old ones.
Moreover, developers are stacked under the pile of pressure to deliver releases as fast as possible — add new features, fix bugs and beat the competition. Great software engineering teams have turned to continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) to build, test, and add small incremental updates quickly.
- Better Results “With a Little Help from Your Friends”
John used an unsystematic approach to songwriting during the Lennon-McCartney years. But instead of relying on himself to put together the song fragments, he would use Paul as a sounding board. John would show song fragments to Paul (or vice versa).
They would use the assembly-line technique; for finishing and enhancing the original idea. Frequently, two incomplete songs that each had worked on separately would be turned into recording-breaking songs.
During a 2018 interview, when McCartney was asked to highlight this methodology, he said, “When we worked together on something, often what would happen is that whoever would be the creator of this song would bring in the first verse, and then we’d sit down and we’d take it from there.” So what’s the point here? Simple — sometimes scouting for a collaborator is the best way to enhance your creativity.
Similarly, software engineers can follow the peer review approach instead of code review. Code review is limited to the process of examining other developers’ work after it has been implemented and suggesting improvements. It is a good practice to screen errors in a code, but there is a better approach that can save your time — peer review.
Peer review starts even before a single line of a code is written. In this approach, the corrections are not left until the last stage, and it saves the team from opting for a sub-par solution in the interest of time. Also, if there is time to change tack, it can appear as developing the solution twice. Thus, before coding begins, developers should discuss their approach with their team (of developers).
But will peer review make any other difference apart from saving time? Yes, it offers an array of other benefits that can help your team in the long run. We have enlisted some of the many advantages of incorporating it into your team:
- It makes your team learn that collaboration and interaction are key to writing good code.
- It can help other teammates to upskill as peer review socializes a mindset of software quality in your company.
- It offers an ideal venue for knowledge sharing across the boundaries of silos. It plummets the dependency of the project on an individual as all the team understands the various aspects of the project.
- It acts as a benison for junior developers as they get the assistance of senior developers when the code is too complex.
Decode A Bug-Free Journey From The Beatles’ Biggest Failures
The Beatles have an ever-growing list of delirious fans. The collaboration of each band members has made their music timeless. McCartney and Lennon, musical engineers utilized the power and necessity of collaborative engineering. Later the band split, but they still continued to entertain their fans individually. To their dismay, the solo performances were never as good as their band performances.
Both success and failure are two sides of the same coin. Failure, where due, is inevitable but you can combat it with a strategic plan.
The words “failure” and “The Beatles” are rarely used together. However, The Beatles’ early career was marked by a string of failures, culminating in an unsuccessful audition with Decca Records, the major record label of the day. The band was on the verge of disbanding because of this setback.
Apart from the initial failures, the band still found ways to survive, but later the band hit the rock bottom, broke up in 1970, and the music scene was never the same.
Here are several takeaways from The Beatles’ biggest setback.
- Refresh Team Purpose
By 1969, there was growing tension among The Beatles. Their reasons for working as a band had narrowed significantly since the inception of the band. The ambitious drive in Lennon, McCartney, Starr, and Geroge Harrison as well as lack of team purpose led them to different directions, they worked on their solo albums. Band members had entered a phase where they felt: “We Can{not} Work it Out”(creatively with each other).
Similarly, it is paramount to invest time and effort in devising team goals to ensure all engineers are working in one direction. Engineers should keep in mind that remembering and/or renewing team goals is just as crucial as launching them. This can be accomplished by ensuring that team goals remain aligned with individual goals while maintaining project requirements.
- Behavioral and Work-Ethic Checks
Establishing working standards is critical in any team setting to generate collective means, rapport, and behavioral expectations. If these elements are removed or changed without being addressed properly and formally, it might cause long-term issues.
Multiple instances of band member’s arguments came to the surface during The Beatles’ White Album sessions. Without the consent of his teammates, John Lennon brought his new lover (Yoko Ono) to nearly every session. The interference of Yoko in the song-making process irked others. Lennon blurred the professional and personal life boundaries, which made him look unprofessional. Moreover, it contributed to career-ending bitterness between the band members.
In a nutshell, when team members do not adhere to the rules and regulations, then the means of working together become obfuscated. Moreover, it leads to unsatisfactory results.
- Ditching Collaborative Engineering
After Epstein’s (band manager) demise, each band member began to pursue independent artistic agendas. They gave a shot to collaborate, but miserably failed to do so. It became difficult to come up with a cohesive sound that they could all agree on. Tensions began to build between the group members, including Lennon’s personal and professional life imbalance.
These real-life incidents show the downfall of the band, which was due to eliminating collaborative engineering. Thus, it is a prudent choice to opt for it. As it helps the members to work in sync and enhance their skills.
Without the centrifugal force — collaborative engineering — a project can fall apart, leading to nullify the past success.
What Do Industry Leaders Say About The Beatles?
Steve Jobs in ’60 Minutes Overtime’ mentioned how his model of business is influenced by The Beatles. He was inspired by how The Beatles kept a check on each other’s negative tendencies and balanced each other.
Also, when Gates, in an interview on the BBC show Desert Island Discs, was asked to select eight songs and why they are meaningful to him, he had one picked out for Jobs — “Two of Us” by The Beatles. According to him, the song defined his relationship with Jobs.
Innovation, Collaboration, And Revolution
Even with the WFH scenario, there are many intuitive, process-driven, and flexible ways for team members to contribute toward client’s requirements. But the best way to deliver in time is by following a collaborative engineering approach.
As McCartney said: “When you think about it, when you are writing a song, you are always trying to write something that you love, and the people will love.”
The same is true for software engineering. The best way of building great quality software is not in silos but by collaborating with team members and comprehending the market needs.
There is a lesson to be learned here, as traditional organizations are hurrying to implement digital transformation while cloud-native start-ups fully leverage their agility. Collaboration is essential for creativity, which is vital for existence.
