Questions every team and dev lead should ask themselves

here are the questions that teams and team leads should be asking themselves on a daily\weekly basis.

There are more, but these are the basics, to me. It’s part of the summary for the talk “Beautiful teams I am giving at SEConf and NDC. we do a lot of this stuff over at work, and it’s proving itself on a daily basis.

Whole team

  1. What can we automate?
  2. where are we "Reinventing the wheel"?
  3. what are the tools that slow us down?
  4. what tools can we use better?
  5. are there bugs that I could have found earlier? how do I make sure I find them earlier?
  6. when do we find out we built the right thing?
  7. when do we find out our code\design sucks? how can we make that earlier?
  8. How do we show progress at the team level? at the management level?
  9. How many meetings does each dev have every week? how can we remove them?
  10. Are we building by feature or by layer?
  11. can we make all our team sit in the same place?

Team Lead

  1. daily: what bottlenecks exist in the team? what have I solved?
  2. will my devs be better in a month or two than they were before? if not, how do I make that happen?
  3. what prevents my devs from working? what am I doing about this?
Published Tuesday, June 16, 2009 1:43 AM by RoyOsherove
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Comments

Tuesday, June 16, 2009 11:54 AM by Phil Leggetter

# re: Questions every team and dev lead should ask themselves

Quite a lot of this is part of what SCRUM should offer your dev team.

Whole Team

==========

You are aware of 6 (did we build the right thing) much sooner since you work in small iterations

8 (progress at team and management level) since the whiteboard and tasks are always visible to the whole company, you also do a demo at the end of your sprint.

10 (feature or layer) You always build by user story which I class as a feature.

11 (sit in the same place) it's almost a must in SCRUM that you are co-located although technology allows distributed working (skype etc.)

Team Lead

=========

1 & 3 (bottlenecks and blocks) is one of the things you ask in your daily standup and is part of the SCRUM masters job to clear blocks and facilitate the teams ability to get on.

If the team leader is any good then 2 (will my devs be better) should be a definite "yes"

Continuous integration will help with 1, 3, 4, 5 and 8.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009 1:00 AM by Mark Roddy

# re: Questions every team and dev lead should ask themselves

7) when do we find out our code\design sucks? how can we make that earlier?

Addendum:

Are we able to admit/realize that our design sucks?  If not, is this a function of our skill or personalities?

Wednesday, June 17, 2009 6:56 AM by The Technology Post for June 16th, 2009 | rapid-DEV.net

# The Technology Post for June 16th, 2009 | rapid-DEV.net

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Wednesday, June 17, 2009 7:39 AM by Daily Links for Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

# Daily Links for Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Pingback from  Daily Links for Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Wednesday, June 17, 2009 12:06 PM by Visual Studio Hacks

# Visual Studio Links #119

My latest in a series of the weekly, or more often, summary of interesting links I come across related to Visual Studio. Greg Duncan has posted a few good links: Free Training of the Week – Seven hours of free, for a limited time, .Net (C#/VB) training

Thursday, June 18, 2009 12:29 PM by Keith G.

# re: Questions every team and dev lead should ask themselves

> #11 can we make all our team sit in the same place?

Please don't ask that!  I just escaped a spirit-dampening cubicle farm, and back into an office with a window.  My job satisfaction is much improved because of it.

Thursday, June 18, 2009 4:07 PM by Doron

# re: Questions every team and dev lead should ask themselves

Keith, can you sincerely say it improved the communication you have with the rest of your team? Can you say it did not take negative impact due to that?

A joint workspace doesn't have to be a bland, uniform cubical farm. I came from such a farm and where I work now (even though at first look much humbler) is a much more humane environment, just inviting open communications.

just my 2c

Saturday, June 20, 2009 10:48 PM by gOODiDEA.NET

# Interesting Finds: 2009 06.15 ~ 06.21

Web Named function expressions demystified Project Voldemort - a distributed key-value storage system

Saturday, June 20, 2009 10:50 PM by gOODiDEA

# Interesting Finds: 2009 06.15 ~ 06.21

WebNamedfunctionexpressionsdemystifiedProjectVoldemort-adistributedkey-valuestora...

Monday, June 22, 2009 12:24 PM by Kevin Stevens

# re: Questions every team and dev lead should ask themselves

@Doron

Communication != Productivity

To place communication as a first order problem to be solved is a mistake, I think. What is more important is to manage and reduce interruptions while coding/designing/thinking. There should be a barrier (easily surmounted, but a barrier nonetheless) between engineers and the people who want answers from them. Open spaces are the worst for this as interrupting one engineer easily turns into interrupting all of them.