Slashdot Mirror
Guide For Small Team Programming?
dm writes "I run a small design shop and have been doing more and more web development, including fairly involved back-end programming of what's now essentially become our own CMS. Up to now I've been doing all the programming myself. Now we are working with a second programmer for the first time. I already use version control (SVN) and an issue-tracking system, and I guess we are both decent at what we do — although self-taught, but we both lack experience programming in a team context. Is there a useful guide for this? Most of the tutorials I have seen for Subversion are surprisingly organized from a single coder's perspective. Where else should I look?"
Both excellent books for this situation, in my opinion.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Sorry it's not about the perfect solution for your problem, but keeping
things in mind about the new context can improve things.
These are the lessons I learned from jobs and life either.
a.) be precise what you are talking about
- missunderstandings tend to poison the atmosphere at work
b.) clear missunderstandings as early as you can
c.) keep in mind that you now have a coworker
- trust him, he can do things on his own
d.) keep in touch with him
- this means you also report to him what you are doing
"primus inter pares" first within a group of similars,
you are the leader? dont behave like "the Führer"
e.) if you recognize anger, missunderstandings etc.. talk about
f.) keep in mind two programers are two human beings
g.) give him all the information you have
- if information is being held away, he would feel "pissed off".
h.)
- "smile"
- behave
- use "please" and "thankyou"
- commendation (wisely used)
g.)
let him bring some of his ideas in, discuss ideads,
if commendation comes from your boss, be modest and inform your boss if it was
your coworkers idea.
Communicate! The basic need for team work is comminication.
These are aspects I learned, when followed, it is allready team work, you don't need
a special conception for team work.
There are lots of things I could throw out, sure, but most of them came from principle numero uno - talk to each other.
I second that. And don't just "talk to each other." There's a lot of different ways you can communicate with one another. For instance:
Do you both work independently and then regularly schedule periodic code reviews 2x a week? Or do you do code reviews on a more demand-driven basis when someone feels they have a particular milestone to show the other? Or do you sit next to one another and work in a pair-programming team?
Do you put documents in a shared place that define the design of things? When you discuss designs together face-to-face, do you take notes?
One of these answers isn't inherently better than any other, but what you should probably be striving for is to take a step back and analyze the process of developing and communicating with your partner itself, and adapt that as you, your project, etc evolve as well. So always try to communicate better this month than you did last month, where defining "better" is specific to you two. Then when the third programmer comes along, you'll have a framework to work with him in as well.
One concrete suggestion though: For your design docs and instructions on how to build and test things, start a wiki. You might be in charge of 3--5 people before you know it, and the "tacit knowledge" of how to operate your system will be continually harder to pass on without something like this.
I run a small dev team for a company of 12 people. 2 of us are 'senior' dev guys, 1 is a graphics guy in marketing, and the 4th is a guy still in school. The rest are professional services or customer reps. My company does web crawling (lots of SQL, perl, automation) and then some web stuff to display the results and various reports. Pretty much I meet with the owner once a week and we make sure we are on the same page as to what the big projects we are working on (more news coverage, some cool new chart system, etc.) then we have a really quick tech huddle every morning at 9:00. Pretty much roll your chair over and we all look at the whiteboard, what did you do yesterday, what are we working on today. Are we on track to get X done for Monday? And y done for next Monday? Every piece of every project is on the board assigned to somebody. We use source control and have a ticket system, here's a good example of how we worked on a recent project together.
We needed to write a new mail system. We mail out a few thousand reports a day to clients but our old one was prone to errors and failures. I work mostly with SQL, perl, and architecture, I suck at web/interface stuff. I know enough about it to throw a table up but it is ugly. The other senior guy is great at interface stuff, slick javascripty boxes and he's OK with backend stuff but it's never optimized and will bog down. We know what each other is good at and we like it that way! So I sat down in a conference room with my senior guy and we mapped out how to do this. A queue system, this talks to this, we need a template here, this should be stored in a db, this should be in the code, etc. Broke it all down into pieces. I took on the details loading up of the queue system, the other guy took on the reading out of the queue to send the mails. With that he gave the graphics guy the task of "Write up all the CSS to make 4 templates of daily reports, make them look cool". He would then take that CSS and dump it into the mailing code he had written. I had our Jr. guy write internal reporting of the queuing system to track when mails go out and an internal dashboard of it.
Once it was decided what we were doing nobody had to waste time in meetings or anything, just needed to talk once in a while, "Hey, I'm going to put this flag in the queue tell you which template to use, how do you want to receive it on your end?" Each piece of the project is compartmentalized, I don't even need to think, "gee, I hope the graphics line up" or "Oh man, I'll need to write an internal report for this", it's all been delegated. I just do my part, everybody does there's and when it's all done we test and I just make sure the end product is solid. "Ok, reports going out now? I'll reboot the mail server, let's see if we lose any repots, the queue handles that right?" Not having to worry about all the details makes doing my part much easier. I worried about the details when we designed it, so now it's just getting it done. In the end I'm the director and it's up to me to make sure it's done but I act a lot more like a peer as I do as much work as the other guys, but I also handle all the meetings with the other groups. My team can focus on code and banging that project out while I deal with any BS that would just slow the team down. I've found this is a huge help on moral, how bad is it when the marketing guy wants his cake and eat it too and then the whole dev team just goes back to there desk and bitches about it. Instead I just go to the meeting 1 on 1 and will say, "I think you just wanted to cake here, no eating." That way he doesn't look silly and I can go back to my team and say, "Ok, we are baking a cake." and there is no confusion. I'd say half of being a good dev leader is understand wtf the people really want (not what they ask for) and then translating that to the rest of the dev guys, "Hey, let's be solution providers, not coders."
I've found using a ticket system is helpful for people outside my department for putting requests in, for
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise - William Shakespeare
1. Keep the team small. 2-4 people is best.
2. Ignore heavyweight Methodologies and Methodists.
3. You need a specification, a small document in the language of the customer, that describes what the customer hopes to accomplish with the software you're writing. If the customer cannot understand the spec, you're doing it wrong.
4. You need some white boards.
5. You need to get good with a pretty-printer so you don't have to waste hundreds of hours arguing about coding styles.
6. If you have documents that describe the programs and they are constantly getting out of sync with the code, write clear code with decent names and throw the documents away. On 99% of the projects I've seen (mostly Fortune 500 co's), the documentation outside the code quickly becomes actually misleading and slows people down if they read it first in their attempt to understand the code.
7. 1 talented, motivated, socially adept programmer is worth 1,000 mid-range unmotivated socially inept programmers.
Peopleware is pretty good. Mythical Man Month is better.
Good luck.
That answer depends on the goals for the team.
Studies and statistics have shown that 3 is actually the best number of programmers on a project. I can't find the reference now, but for a 5M line group of programs where I worked previously, we captured stats on all sorts of things. 3 was definitely the best optimization for productivity, quality, and simplicity. A team produces something better than the sum of the parts.
1 works if you are an expert on everything (or think you are) or working on a fairly trivial program or have lots of time to finish. Best of all, there's nobody else to point out your mistakes.
Only if you're some freaky self-motivated person.
Otherwise you'll surf the web all day after getting up at 1pm and watching Daytime TV for a few hours.
Two people will motivate each other. Three people might even get the time to do other business essential things, like the accounts! Also nicer for pub lunches, two people is a bit one-on-one.
More than three and I think that you start getting communications issues, unless you are all working on very different projects rather than the same codebase. Once you're in the meeting room, with the projector, and the Wii, you'll end up playing Mario Kart, which kills productivity. Also there's enough people to not have the focus on your own work, so you'll surf the web unless you're self-motivated enough or have a deadline.