I'm software developer, and in almost every team I’ve been on, we had the same recurring issue: shared things with no clear ownership.
Things like:
- staging environments
- test devices
- sandbox accounts
And it always ends up the same way: someone deploys over someone else, QA tests get interrupted, or you’re digging through Slack asking “who’s using this right now?”
We tried a bunch of solutions over time:
1. Slack: People end up pinging each other to figure out who’s using which environment. Sometimes a dedicated channel is created where everyone posts updates like "Reserving Service X on staging". The problem is these messages quickly get buried, are easy to miss, and create constant context switching noise.
2. Spreadsheets: A more “organized” version of the Slack channel—environments. with (Staging 1, Staging 2, etc.) as columns, and team members as rows, and an “X” marking who’s using what. In reality it quickly becomes outdated and unreliable.
I got a bit fed up with it and ended up building an internal app to experiment with a different approach: basically a simple way to see what’s currently in use and “reserve”/"release" it (with a queue function if it’s taken), right in your task bar, with no need to do any context switching.
I'm curious whether you faced the same issue in your teams? and how are you handling it?
Things like:
- staging environments - test devices - sandbox accounts
And it always ends up the same way: someone deploys over someone else, QA tests get interrupted, or you’re digging through Slack asking “who’s using this right now?”
We tried a bunch of solutions over time:
1. Slack: People end up pinging each other to figure out who’s using which environment. Sometimes a dedicated channel is created where everyone posts updates like "Reserving Service X on staging". The problem is these messages quickly get buried, are easy to miss, and create constant context switching noise.
2. Spreadsheets: A more “organized” version of the Slack channel—environments. with (Staging 1, Staging 2, etc.) as columns, and team members as rows, and an “X” marking who’s using what. In reality it quickly becomes outdated and unreliable.
I got a bit fed up with it and ended up building an internal app to experiment with a different approach: basically a simple way to see what’s currently in use and “reserve”/"release" it (with a queue function if it’s taken), right in your task bar, with no need to do any context switching.
I'm curious whether you faced the same issue in your teams? and how are you handling it?