Patterns of Effective Teams

Again, Dan North, again great talk!

The talk was going around the following map:

Patterns

Dreyfus Squared

• Different levels of people, do the pairing!, share the love and knowledge within the team

Shallow Silos

• Rotate team/pairs

Seize of Day

• Energize standups, discuss the status, not just report!, we don’t care about the brief status: I did XYZ, I will do ABC, I have no issues. Do the real scrum as it was inspired from american footbal to decide what the team will do now, today and how it’s going to solve the current problems.

Near and far

• Cross-funcational teams vs. single specialized teams
  • solution in the middle, keep having very specialized teams but ask them to teach cross-functional teams

Warm welcome

• already covered in his previous talk

Code Critique aka code reviews

• Learning from others
• Socializing

Team Hack Days

• “TODO” days
• “SMELLS” days – fix the smells in the code, I know, you don’t have smell in the code, just in case
• “RESEARCH” days
• go and play with non-project tasks
• => getting people together, great ideas can evolve

Walk a mile:

• What’s the benefit of person (dev, manager)
  • Walk in his/her shoes
  • Take him off and let’s see

TDD

• Can slow down in case I don’t know where you are heading to, i.e. prototyping, proposing different solutions,
• Find a balance where it’s needed, some simple code could be verified by explanatory tester and it’s wasting of dev time