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Success factors for quality software development teams

Some notes from a short presentation I gave on building quality software development teams:

  • Effective teams start with good people. A business is not a charity and cannot wait for people to grow into the role required of them. Intelligence and inherent motivation cannot be taught. These and many other aspects must be screened for.
  • But hiring good people is not enough.  Getting the most of a development team requires certain environmental factors. I have organized them into three areas:  internal/motivational, structural/organizational, and interpersonal/communication. Sometimes they will conflict with practical considerations, but we ought to take them consideration whenever possible.

Motivation
  • Instill a sense of professional pride
    • Developers should take part in the technical design
    • Provide interesting, challenging work
    • Developers should own the technical solution
    • Technical architects should be part of the development team
  • Respect the developer time
    • Provide a quiet environment dedicated to development work
    • Buy the best tools for the jobs – powerful computers, large monitors, etc.
  • Reward learning and exploration
    • Take (reasonable) risks with new technologies
    • Schedule time for self-education and information sharing
  • Create a sense of project ownership
    • Delegation “ownership” of functional parts to individual people
    • Assign developers responsibility for follow-up maintenance (don’t just hand it off to a maintenance team)
Structure
  • Hold people accountable for their work:
    • Use a work unit tracking system (TFS, etc)
    • Make task status publicly visible
    • Hold daily stand ups (Scrum)
    • Consider a public scrum board
    • Provide clear project requirements
    • Lean development approach
      • No time-wasting tasks (useless documentation)
      • Isolate developers from unrelated tasks (no business interruptions)
  • Hold high expectations
    • Monitor quality of work with code reviews
    • Regular training & information sharing sessions
    • Consequences for bad work
  • Set well defined deadlines
    • Don’t set arbitrary deadlines, but all work should have a deadline
    • Developers should have input on deadlines for their work units
Team Communication
  • Instill a sense of collective ownership of the project
    • Hold architectural education sessions
  • High-bandwidth communications
    • Entire team should work in physical proximity
  • Make quality visible
    • Use continuous integration and automated testing to provide immediate feedback of quality
    • Developers should fix their own bugs
    • Track quality over time
  • Explicit mentor roles
  • Mentor roles should be explicitly defined
  • Mentoring time should be scheduled into the project

 

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