Team Management

Articles

  • The Quiet Crisis unfolding in Software Development - by Bill Jordan
    • Agree
      • Judging performance
        • Be wary of high performers who may just be focused on looking productive over developing good solutions
        • Watch out for misleading metrics
        • The team will self select their technical leaders
      • Code reviews - need to have - should involve significant discussion
      • Limit interruptions
      • Encourage experimentation - ex: 20% time
      • Let employees leave
      • Never turn down small requests
      • Avoid yearly and bi-yearly performance reviews
      • Don't discount younger or older devs (diversity in general is good)
    • Less convinced
      • Encourage code ownership - I agree in encouraging passion, but don't like the idea of silos of knowledge or preventing a dev from working in some area (especially if they are passionate about that area)
      • Prefer private workspaces - I think it depends on personality and culture of team - not sure on the absolute merits of each option. Private somewhat discourages collaboration. I've seen pair programming be *very* effective, but it's hard to recreate the culture

What would I put in an article on recommended team practices?

  • efficiency
  • quality (internal and external)
  • code reviews
  • shared ownership - without discouraging developer passion
  • Mind the culture
    • helping others / collaboration
    • the right amount of concise internal documentation
    • Pair Programming (if possible)
    • Hiring practices are very important
    • TDD
  • Internal openness can be a pretty powerful thing. Getting access to the code/documentation/systems you are actually supposed to work on can be so difficult sometimes. In todays era of public open source on github with the ability for anyone to post a pull request, harnessing the same energy and power inside an organization should definitely be a positive thing
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