It's Clear To Me

It’s clear to me that building a super team is more important than expecting to hire (or create) lone superheroes. A highly effective team can produce amazing output from mere mortals. I certainly have nothing against working to improve each individual. It IS important. To me, it just doesn’t make sense to do it at the expense of building a team. My e...

It’s clear to me that regularly rotating Pairs of programmers gives you efficient, effective transfer of knowledge, values, and culture. A good idea, once envisioned, is soon practiced by every pair. Pairing ensures adoption of the highest common denominator, naturally. There is no need for additional (time consuming, distracting, and inefficient) proce...

Extreme Programming proved that adopting a philosophy of "if I truly need to do it, then I should do it all the time" can be amazingly productive. They said, "Forget integrating every 6 months. Let's do continuous integration." Many of my teams have waited until things were falling apart to finally realize that the team needs to work together. It's cl...

How do you achieve constant productivity from individuals in your group? How do individuals motivate themselves to have urgency? How do individuals process the constant flow of information about our craft? How do individuals make up for their own weakness? How do individuals multiply their strengths? How do individuals know how to work together, effective...

It's clear to me that every development team has needs. Here is my take on what a development team needs to be effective. I find these to be true for me, personally, and for the teams that I have been a part of. When a team didn't have these things, they suffered because of it. Developer happiness suffered. Productivity suffered. We need a clear v...