Observations of software development

These are some observations of mine of various software development teams that I've been in or seen working over the past 18 or so years.

1. Opportunity cost of doing the current best practice well, prevents us from moving quickly to a newer, better practice. Mastery vs agility.
2. Existing culture is the prevailing limiter of change in mindset.
3. The tax for using the construction industry model for software development, while useful for scaling, makes it harder to get value from software in the short and medium term.
4. We are teaching programming by getting people to write code, instead of learning to read code. This is the inverse of other languages.
5. Our industry lacks a great "masterpiece" of design and code. Design patterns are a start, but not comprehensive enough.
6. When groups and organisations are transforming their ways of working and they fail, instead of correcting the failure, they fall back on what worked from their old way of working even if that prevents the transformation from completing.
7. Engineers will change tools more quickly, than change behaviour with the tool. In fact they will carry existing "mastery" into the new tool, unless the new tool explicitly prohibits it somehow.

Team Trotters

Let's explore some of the good qualities of and bad qualities of a well formed team, by debriefing a video of the team in action.

The team in question have been working together for many years. Have a look at the video, a few times if you need to. Then take 5 minutes to think about what the team does well? Now take 5 minutes to think about what they do badly?

Video

While the resulting work of the team turns out to be a funny disaster, this team demonstrates some good and bad attributes of a well formed and performing team

Good team attributes

1. Knowledgable
2. Obvious leader
3. Had enough people to do the job
4. Delegation
5. Defined roles
6. Stronger men in the "right" place
7. Confidence
8. Right tools for the job
9. Succeeded in getting the job in the first place
10. Displayed expertise
11. Trusted each other
12. "good" communication
13. Motivated - money, prestige
14. Courage to take on the job
15. One, very clear goal

Bad team attributes

1. All planning was in dels head
2. Del's assumptions
3. other team members reliance on Del's thinking
4. Del's leadership style, Del was dismissive, belittling of butler
5. Hadn't actually done it before
6. No real energy
7. Hierarchical team
8. members didn't share leaders motivations
9. no continuous improvements
10. Del always compensated for others lack of competence
11. Del didn't realise his own limitations
12. Poor Communication - All talk, very little listening.
13. Complacency - Members are overly familiar with each other
14. Poor result - they break the chandelier

Reflect

Can you recognise any of these attributes in your team? What are you doing well? What aspects of your team could you improve?