Software Development is always a Team Effort: Using the collective "we"

In an enterprise environment, software is often written by dozens of developers, distributed over multiple teams. When thinking about software development, we often equate it with its most basic ingredient: Writing code.

However, there are many other things at play: Reviewing code, creating pipelines, setting up and maintaining infrastructure that runs the software, and so on.

And that’s just a high-level view on what needs doing on a technical level; there are also many other things involved: Designing the software and its architecture, creating and distributing workable items (often JIRA stories), reviewing code before it is merged, monitoring the actual live software, managing processes for when things go south - and so on and so forth.

In short: Apart from writing code, there are many other tasks that need doing in order to write software successfully.

Using the collective “we”

When writing some piece of code, it only feels natural to state that “I have implemented something”. However, as outlined above, a lot of things happened before that particular piece of code was written - and, after it was written, many more things will need to be performed (often on a continuous basis) in order to be of actual use to anyone.

In order to include everyone who has contributed in this process, I therefore usually try to use instead the “collective we”: “We have implemented something”. Yes, I might have written a particular piece of code, but someone might have already done some preliminary analysis, has maybe discussed something with me, has maybe reviewed the code, and so on - therefore, it was certainly a team effort, and I find that using the “we” helps to emphasize that rather nicely.