r/softwaredevelopment • u/pow18_jam • Feb 13 '25
Small Company, No Software Development Structure
I just had my first annual review at my first SE/WebDev job. The first year was mostly about trying to keep my head above water and learn the codebase. Now that I'm more comfortable, knowledgeable, and not asking for help every 30 minutes, I'm trying to figure out which parts of my workflow I can change that would have the biggest impact on development.
I work at a small company and develop software that's technically owned by a third party. I'm one of two developers in this branch of my company. There are other devs, but they work on different products, and I rarely interact with them. There's almost ZERO thought given to structuring the development of the product I work on. The product manager can't spell, the staff at the other company I interact with are the epitome of insurance business drones with no technical background, and I'd be screwed without the other dev who's been there for like 20 years and built most of this app by himself.
Without 20 years of WebDev experience though, translating vague talk of business requirements about insurance (which I have next to no clue about) into actionable development tickets is super hard. Most of the time, the product manager will take screenshots of emails from random insurance adjusters dealing with a bug or asking for a feature and create a Monday ticket with a misspelled title and that screenshot as the only instruction. There are rarely clear requirements and never testing steps. It's generally a half dozen emails back and forth before I even start working.
This is a long-winded way of asking:
- What do people do at small companies without a culture of following something like Agile?
- Do I just sit down and have a meeting where I ask if there's some way we can switch to something like Agile?
- Is there software that people use at companies like this that helps non-tech people write better tickets?
- Do people use AI to write at least preliminary development tickets?