> A customer comes in with a request: they want data that the API really should be able to provide but the team hasn't prioritised this feature yet. Our friend here spends a couple of days manually getting the data the customer needs.
This is the correct call, both technically and for the customer. The feature is planned but not prioritized, so pulling it in right now screws up the sprint. It will almost certainly also take longer to write, debug, test, and ship than it will to just pull the data - and even that assumes no UI is required for the customer to use it. A manual pull is the fastest way to satisfy the request, and that's why it's the right call from that perspective.
Note also that our friend does not only pull the data, but also documents how that was done. This means that when the relevant feature ticket does come into a sprint, it comes with detailed information and a worked example on exactly how it needs to do what it does. That'll save whoever picks it up a ton of discovery time, and that's why it's the right call from that perspective.
"Programmer" isn't the job title. "Engineer" is. There's a lot of reasons why. This kind of thing is one of them.
That's very insightful.... I think the term Engineer is used rather loosely when applied to programmers... now I get the difference. Writing the code is the easy part, knowing what to write is the skill, thus Engineer.
This is the correct call, both technically and for the customer. The feature is planned but not prioritized, so pulling it in right now screws up the sprint. It will almost certainly also take longer to write, debug, test, and ship than it will to just pull the data - and even that assumes no UI is required for the customer to use it. A manual pull is the fastest way to satisfy the request, and that's why it's the right call from that perspective.
Note also that our friend does not only pull the data, but also documents how that was done. This means that when the relevant feature ticket does come into a sprint, it comes with detailed information and a worked example on exactly how it needs to do what it does. That'll save whoever picks it up a ton of discovery time, and that's why it's the right call from that perspective.
"Programmer" isn't the job title. "Engineer" is. There's a lot of reasons why. This kind of thing is one of them.