Having a good team that works well together is one of the most important things when developing software. If your team does not work well together the product will suffer.
What team-building activities can be used to help build and promote a better software team?
Personal experience would be great, but all suggestions welcome.
We had office cubicle mini-golf one winter day. That was fun. We also went to a cooking school, where we made some awesome beef tenderloin, then ate it.
Tea! Best team I ran stopped at 4 every afternoon for tea and we all decamped to the boardroom for a cup of tea and a chat. It is amazing how much productive cross-pollination went on. We bonded too and an informal rota for tea making and cake buying emerged. We did it for almost 7 years and were known across the company for doing it. We even went as far as inviting interviewees in for tea once they had gone through the formal process so we could take a look and get an idea of their suitability.
As a result we were a much more cohesive team. The only people I lost were through forced redundancies. We did some really great projects and worked very hard, but it was fun. I am still in touch with most of the people from that period of my life.
Some of us extended tea to beer - outside office hours of course. We worked in central London and the local pub was often a place where the office politics got worked out.
Edit: I missed out an important thing. We had huge whiteboards on the walls of the tea/board room and we'd put difficult problems up which would get solved slowly and thoroughly through group effort. We had one board which stayed up for almost a year as we all worked on software around it. It was a really good way of sharing intelligence and expertise.
The team building for my last contract was paint-balling.
I didn't go and got lots of work done instead as all the managers were running round in the woods rather than organising meetings.
Our chief hardware engineer was shot in the leg and due to the following infection and complications was off work for the best part of three months.
We have a gym at work, so we workout twice a week at lunch and play basketball on Fridays. Of course there is only 3 of use in our dev team. Team building and stress relief.
I work as part of a distributed team of contractors serving as subcontractors for a project management team. It has worked really well so far. Our team building exercise was a business retreat to Hawaii in January, and I couldn't have been happier. We stayed on Kauai, talked business and technical stuff for 3-4 hours after waking up, and then would hit the surf and explore the beautiful island.
Stealing from Manager-Tools.com plus a little of my own experience...
Many people focus on building a team by having fun. This isn't bad, but it doesn't build team cohesion. Real cohesion is built from shared success, not manufactured experiences like lunch. This is not to say that having lunch isn't a great tool for keeping everything on an even keel, but to build a solid professional team that knows it can rely on its members, each member must show they are contributing and show what they can contribute.
Hope this helps. Number 1-3 are basic professionalism. Number 4 may take some conscious effort but is amazing at building a /real/ shared experience toward what is truly the common goal of the project.
Three jobs ago, we had one of those "team building exercise" things and every single activity was awkward and horrible. One of them involved us all standing in a line, each person connected by holding one end of an uncooked piece of spaghetti. We then had to do an obstacle course without breaking the spaghetti. It was sort of funny but then the organizer (just an employee) had to make some heavy handed analogy about how we have to work as a team and the spaghetti was somehow symbolic of the bonds our teams form with each other.
Suffice it to say I called in sick the following year on that day, as did about half the staff. I quit shortly thereafter.
So - don't use that one.
We sometimes play Call of Duty during lunch. Some days we go to a shooting range and blow off some steam.
Chat over coffee works and once a month lunch dates. Weekend getaway works for us to like we drink out or we stay at one house to eat and drink.
We are actually looking at San Diego Team Building as an annual activity.
In the modern workplace, discussion about teamwork and team building has become a common. In most organizations, people work in groups. However, many people don’t have a solid understanding of what real teamwork is or how to have effective team building in different groups.
We do a type of Trust Fall where each person drops their laptop and the team catches it.