Team building, in my opinion, is often misunderstood concept! The wikipedia definition is also very theoretical. But i think it is real critical skill for any team leader. So, How do you "team-build"? Do you just book some conference room in a big hotel and discuss the same things you do at your regular meetings? Or you do you tak...
We've recently moved to using the wiki in our team. Earlier, we thought people couldn't contribute because it was difficult to. However, having a wiki (3 months now) hasn't helped as much as we'd hoped. Most folks still put it off as 'not my job'. How do I encourage my team to contribute to the wiki? NOTE: One useful resource I found i...
In an ideal world every software development team would be populated with PhD-level team members, all highly motivated and working in harmony. But most businesses are not as well-funded and focused as, say, Google or Microsoft, and quite often a legacy of poor hiring practices means that a team of reasonable size (say 10 or more) will p...
I've recently started in a new team of classic ASP developers and part of my role is to re-train the team in ASP.NET 3.5 and C#. To kick things off I've been running weekly training sessions on the fundamentals (as well as some sexier sessions on Linq & Ajax) and these have proven quite popular. However, despite a little dabbling, ther...
Some context upfront: Imagine a 200+ developers company finally setting up a more or less independent architecture team/department. The software portfolio consisting of 20+ "projects"/applications of varying sizes in production was taken care of by team-leads/technical-leads, who were responsible for and in charge of the projects "archi...
Looking for input from all, though mostly interested in small engineering teams / small companies (10 - 20 people) that develop web applications: Who is responsible for the overall look and feel of your UI (i.e. setting standards)? Is this person a dedicated resource or does he / she have other responsibilities? What type of backgrou...
There are lots of questions on how to improve communication between teams. One way to start is to identify what one team actually does that the other team really values and do more of that. For example. Our QA team provided a VM for us with: The latest release of our server-based commercial software installed and configured (not an e...
Ok fine, programmers aren't very social. There are a couple people on my team that rarely say a word to anyone else. They won't go to lunch with the rest of the team when we go out, regardless of who pays or where we go. My boss has offered to buy everyone drinks, and one of them went to that, but the other one wasn't interested. Wha...
Welcome Our company has 4-6 programmers, each one working on 1-2 projects, and few more awaiting in schedule. Problem - from my point of view - is as long as I work here I work alone - so do all others. I tried to talk with my boss that I want to work with others, exchange knowledge, learn from each other. He understand me, but also st...
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. ...
It's actually two questions in one: What is the right attitude for a programmer? How do you (or would you) look for one when interviewing or during hiring process? Please note this question is not about personality or traits of a candidate, it is about their attitude towards what they do for living. This is also not about reverse of ...
I'm trying to put a small team (about 5 members to start) together here in Honolulu to work on some hobby-projects members and myself may have, and am having trouble finding other members who are interested. Basically am just looking for people with skills in JavaScript, JQuery, AJAX, PHP, MYSQL, and anything else in that realm. I've pos...
We have a university pretty close by and I'm thinking of trying to hire a student for a small and quite well defined coding project. I know that there will be some drawbacks (level of education, experience and time), but I'm hoping to find someone who is not quite fully set in his/her way of doing things and also might give me a new id...