We're trying to improve the format of our Monday morning meetings (M3). The meeting is among all members of our company (20 persons) including developers, designers, administrative and the company's president. It starts with a round-table of 1 word check-in (social) and then transitions into business aspects. We tried a project-focused...
I'm on a team that uses scrum for our development process. We are currently trying to revamp certain aspects of our process to address some of the problems we've noticed lately. In doing so, we are exploring what it is that we like about the scrum process in general as well as what we don't like in order to help us identify what we as ...
Where I work, we have small teams of 2 - 5 people. As a dev lead, what are some things that you've implemented which makes your team stand out from the others? Meaning, it makes the others teams say, "that's cool" or "why didn't we think of that". Just some thinking out of the box that made your team extremely efficient. ...
We're trying to decide between having all the devs on a particular team to use an absolute path for their code base or if relative paths are fine. One reason I can think for an absolute path, meaning everyone has the same path, is because of IIS and functional tests. Our asp.net functional test use Nunit and WatiN to fire up IE and go ...
Management of our business unit provided us with new goals to achieve: flexibility and quality. Our functional leaders (e.g Test lead, Java team lead etc) should transform these high level goals to something more specific that can be used to improve level of flexibility of individuals and teams and quality of products. Let's focus on the...
Our current project has a large team, and we have come near the end of the project Like most end of projects, dozens of dependencies are popping up - everyone is waiting on someone else to complete a task. What is the best strategy for dealing with this. I have thought of scaling the size of the team down, so the depenencies can be don...
I'm the lead programmer/manager for a team of 6 programmers. There's always one programmer who needs far more attention than all the others and comes by my office to talk to me as much as all the others combined. Some of these things are unimportant, but some are real questions. I don't want to tell my guys not to come talk to me, but...
Lots of companies have "diversity" as one of their goals. I.e. people from a wide variety of backgrounds. The idea being that different backgrounds will result in different ways of approaching problems and the result will be better solutions. How much is this true in practice? Do you find it is good to have teams consisting of people fr...
I'm fairly well read in the benefits and processes of Scrum. I get the ideas on the backlog, burndown charts, iterations, using user stories, and other various concepts of the Scrum "framework". With that said... I work for a web development firm that manages multiple projects at one time, with six team members that make up the "product...
My team has a fairly rich set of formatting rules and save actions and these rules are evolving. We're looking for a mechanism to define the centrally and propagate them automatically. We don't want to reformat the code base, but we expect the formatting to improve incrementally over time. We're using Subversion for source control, thoug...
I'm starting out with SVN. I know the basic commands and understand the base principles. I was wondering if anyone has any tips or best practices for working with Subversion in a team environment. I can see the benefit of adding reasonably verbose messages when committing code, but are there other things I should bear in mind? Than...
we work on a team where there are alot of distractions, production support issues, users questions, lots of simultaneous projects, etc.. any thoughts on best practices on getting the development team to avoid context switching . . ...
I have: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Explorer Version 9.0.21022.8 When I go to Team->Team Foundation Server Settings->Group Memberships; Double-click on 'Team Foundation Server Licensed Users'; Select "Windows User or Group" in the 'Add Member'; In the "Select Users, Computers or Groups" type in the group name, then 'Check Names'...
Some projects teams throw a small office party for major releases - so why not for 1000th commit? 1000th commit is a good marker, usually project has progressed quite nicely by that time. Do you celebrate or give any extra attention to such 'magic number' commits? ...
There is a "How To" on adding developers to the TFS on MSDN. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb668968.aspx It has 3 main parts: Step 1 – Grant Access to the Team Project Step 2 – Grant Access to the SharePoint Project Site Step 3 – Grant Access to SQL Server Reporting Services Fair enough, it works for individual developers. N...
What is the most important thing to take care of when starting a software project? For instance, is it more important to have a handful good programmers that are highly team-minded or would you prefer the same number of uber-strong-skilled maverick programmers? ...
As a team/project manager or as an empowered developer, did you ever have to fire someone (maybe even a co-worker)? If you did, how did you handle the situation? I know there is no single right answer to this question, but wanted to hear some of your experiences. Some background info: As a developer and team lead on some projects I have...
Does anyone use a tool for code collaboration? We already have an existing system that manages our SDLC, so I don't want a separate system. I'm looking for a some tool to annotate code, with comments, that we can archive in our SDLC system. For instance, right now we're using MS Word with the built-in change-tracking and commenting. ...
Yesterday I had a team leader of another team say that they took a while to figure out something I wrote on a wiki page because I referred to obtaining code from source control as "checking out" which apparently confused them. They said that they were use to Clear Case and had only heard of the term "joining a project" and said that the...
It's been a while since I've taken over the responsibility of leading my team and I'm probably doing a reasonable job at it. However, I get the feeling that I am not getting enough exposure to the real-world responsibilities and activities that Team Leaders engage in. On the other hand, it might be I am doing much more than an average Te...