group-dynamics

What was your experience with a Lead Programmer Team Structure?

In the 60s and 70s, Harlan Mills of IBM promoted the idea of Lead Programmer teams, which he compared to a surgical team -- a highly trained and talented individual as the person who was actually "hands on the patient" and who was, in turn, supported by others who provided him or her with tools and routine procedures. He contrasted this ...

How to work in a team where half the devs write logic in code and the other half in stored procedures?

I'm currently working on a team that has half the developers thinking in terms of "objects" and the other half ignore the concepts all together. It's starting to make working together more difficult because the OOP guys (myself included) want to build reusable components that can be leveraged across the system, but the SQL guys just cre...

Best way to deal with 'bad apples'?

In Jeff's latest post on Coding Horror, he talks about the "bad apple" effect: What [the research] found, in short, is that the worst team member is the best predictor of how any team performs. It doesn't seem to matter how great the best member is, or what the average member of the group is like. It all comes down to wha...

Is it useful to send a developer to attend a 3days Microsoft Learning Gateway Workshop?

Hi guys, my company is very LAMP based as of now, and my management had decided to send a hardware guy and a developer to this MLG workshop. From what I check online it's mostly MS trying to bundle up a whole lot of their stuff and try to sell it to us to solve our problems. Plus the fact that most of what we use now are pretty much open...