How I work
I have been working as a professional software engineer for over 4 years now and along the way I have picked up some heuristics about how should I take the task in hand.
Clarification
Getting a crystall clear clarity of what you are going to implement is of paramount importance. Pay as much attention to details as possible. It’s okay to conduct few more meetings with teammates on getting clarification rather than doing a root cause analysis for a misunderstood or a buggy code down the line.
Assess and Document First
Assess the feature you are going to work on and see what are the things it touches directly or indirectly. Having a big picture always helps and gives further confidence on the approach. Document all the findings and get it reviewed. Finally it just becomes a process of translating the discussion into code.
Own your feature
When you work on some feature/task, own it. Set up alerts and other metrics around your feature (at least for first few weeks) so you know if it’s working as intended. Make these metrics/alerts known to your team mates and managers (some slack channel, mail group) so that multiple eyes are on it which means multiple insights.