Leading the Highly Technical Team

Leading a team is definitely challenging but leading a technical team is a very specialised area that is extremely demanding. It is very different to other teams in many ways. A highly technical team is made up of artistic individuals who have a world of knowledge, skills and experience in their own technical areas. The highly skilled technical engineer, developer, programmer, or analyst are not generally known for their people skills. This results in every individual of the team wanting to head in their own direction, each certain that their choice is the right one and demanding that others follow their direction, even the boss.

They not only fall into the “we’ve tried that before and it didn’t work” attitude for every idea, as do most teams anywhere, but these individuals also are more likely to get upset with any changes, need to feel more status than others, and need to be recognised for their often very unique skills.

I have been very fortunate to have made a career out of leading technical teams, sometimes multi cultural, sometimes leading several teams based in different countries around the world.

When thinking about this recently I began to wonder about a question often asked, what makes a good leader? I’ve heard it said that people can be born leaders. Absolute rubbish! People are not born leaders, rather they are a product of the experiences they have and the people they meet. Its those experiences and the advice and ideas they get from people they grow to admire that gives them the tools and mindset to lead others.

Sure there are various skills required to be, for example, a development manager - project management and methodology understanding are some, but I'm not talking about management, I'm talking about leadership. The difference is that a manager manages things but a leader leads people.

Its not much help having a masters degree in project management when your team has no wish to do the project, our you are faced with a team member who wants to undermine you and your project in order to get recognised by the boss above you. Sure you can threaten dismissal or some other disciplinary action but that's not necessarily leadership.

Leadership is having empathy with the team and the individuals within the team, and the ability to focus that team towards a common goal. Providing a common direction is a difficult task for managers and it takes leaders to turn a team towards that common goal.

It’s a sad and unfortunate fact that there seems to be more managers these days than leaders.

To be continued…

Even Programmers need to Communicate

Few programming teams that I have met really understand how important communication is to their everyday lives. Let me yell this from the highest places I can find - Communication is the most important factor a software team can possess, above technical abilities, above delivery, above project work, above code itself. Without communication, a programming team can die.

Take two hypothetical programming teams, one is extremely effective and highly knowledgeable and technical. This team can deliver programs on time and on budget at every opportunity, have a repertoire of current programming languages and skills, and can understand and deliver highly complex applications. However, this team has no communication skills.

The second team has only ever used a single 4GL language, have no technical knowledge outside of their areas and couldn’t hit a delivery target if it was painted on the side of a building in big bold bright neon colours. This team however works hard at communication.

Now let’s put this in terms understood in today’s financial restraints – Which team would be open to being outsourced?

The answer would be the first team. Without communication, this team are “perceived” by management and other departments as a cost to the company and full of Prima Donna programmers who don’t offer any service to the company to justify their (perception) huge salaries.

The second group however are perceived by management as a hard working and loyal group of technically brilliant people that the company simply cannot do without.

Development teams must be able to explain what they are doing, why they are doing it, the value they give to the company, and why that value should be maintained. But we are talking about a bunch of programmers here. By pure definition these people communicate with one’s and zero’s not with other living organisms.

I’ll draw on my own experience to give you a real life example of the changes that communication can give to a programming team.

Many years ago, I was appointed as development Manager to a team of programmers. During the interview process, this team had been described to me as unable to achieve any targets. Production was down and the team was not viewed as a valued asset to the company. It was generally accepted that the team would be outsourced within the next 6 months and I would then move into IT Manager’s role (due to be vacated).

The first few days on the job, I observed what was happening. Every 30 minutes or so, a different department manager would come into the development area and talk directly to one of the developers and demand they drop what they were doing and work on their project as it was needed yesterday. The programmer would dutifully drop their current workload and take up the task demanded of him by that manager.

No wonder the programmers had a bad name - they could never finish anything because they were constantly being shifted to working on something else. Every manager thought the programmers had to be forced to work on their material otherwise they’d never get their project out.

The programmers also complained about their workload telling me they needed to at least double the team to keep up with their work.

I looked at the code and the projects these developers worked on and spoke to them about their work. It quickly became apparent that the skill level was extremely high but the moral was at an all time low. I concluded that their only fault was their communication so I set about correcting this and became the mouthpiece of the Development Team.

There were several things I did immediately which had a huge impact. The first was to put into place a job request form. This was originally a simple paper based form allowing users to enter the details of their project on a paper that had a unique job number. This job number was kept by the internal customer to refer to their request.

For the first time, programmers were then able to prioritise their work. They were also able to see what work was ahead of them. By having all their work available on the desk in front of them, they could tell the internal customer that their job would be due to be completed at a particular date.

I also spoke individually to those customers who filled out the form, explaining the work request form giving them confidence that their project was now in the “system” and that the work was now prioritised and a date for delivery was now available. This meant that customers were much less likely to come in and speak directly to the programmer unless their project was late.

Meaning the programmer could concentrate on completing that one task without interruption - new requests could be referred to the job request and any member of the team could take over this discussion. Jobs were actually getting completed.

Now we had the process in place, I concentrated on communication. It was then my job to support the team by educating everyone on this new process and how to use it to their advantage. I wrote up a development process document and created one-on-one meetings with each of the departmental managers throughout the company. There I showed them through the process and effectively “Sold” the process to them. I also added a “Software Development” column to the company fortnightly newsletter and added the Software Development department to the list of those giving a talk to new employees during their induction. This had the added side effect of being seen by other managers who came along to the induction process for their talk.

I then started talking directly to the CEO (Chief Executive Officer). I told him what was happening to the Software Development Department and what applications we built and look after in his organisation.

Within six months, this department went from being a bunch of dead-beats who were due to be outsourced, to being the only IT department that was confirmed too valuable to be outsourced. The CEO started placing Software Development on his rounds when showing visiting VIPs through the company and the main software packages we wrote and supported were being highlighted as great achievements for the company. Eventually the CEO, in his monthly report, stated that all of the company should look towards the Software Development Department as an example of what a well run department should look like.

So for the matter of a few processes and some effective COMMUNICATION, this team went from a dead weight and an unwanted “cost” to the company, to taking pride of place within the corporate environment.

So yes, even programmers need communication. Few programmers have that ability to communicate effectively. That is their nature in that the skills of a really good developer are in understanding code and code flow, and to understanding the user’s requirements and delivering to them, not in the areas of marketing and communication. It is up to those supporting the team - the Development Manager, the Team Leader, or the Project Manager - to take up this task of communication.

Tools for the Development Team - JIRA

  

Crikey, where did the time go?

This has been a very busy time for the team with a large number of projects and small alterations coming through as well as RFIs and RFPs (Request For Information / Proposal) to answer. It is at these times when a good issue management tool proves its worth and certainly ours did.

I've talked a lot about the different tools that we've looked at here, but we did finally make a decision, the winner was JIRA from Atlassian (http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/).

So what was it about JIRA that made it stand out against the, sometimes free, competition? It does what it does well.

Many of the other programs that I looked at tried to do many things, and in my opinion, sometimes meant that it did none of those very well. JIRA doesn't suffer from that. It knows what its supposed to do and it does it well. That's where the final decision lay as far as the team were concerned.

Getting to know JIRA.

I had used JIRA in the past so it was second nature to me, but not yet to the team. There were a couple of language constraints that we had to get past before some of the team could understand the concept. Everything you place in JIRA is an "Issue". It doesn't matter if its a suggestion, a bug, a task, whatever it is, if its in JIRA, then its an "Issue". This is one of the very few things that I could not change in JIRA.

The other area that new users will enjoy getting used to is that nearly everything in JIRA is configurable. At times it seems that everything that is asked for is there within the configuration available to the JRIA Administrator. You will get to understand how such things as Notification Schemes and Permission Schemes work, and you can assign different schemes to different projects.

Projects

Users or Administrators (depending on what rights the Administrator gives each user or user group) can set up Projects in JIRA and create Issues to the projects. A Project can be either a standard project with a beginning and an end (e.g. a software development project), or an area we can place tasks for normal things needing to be done (e.g. an application or "IT Admin").

I have set up the Notification Scheme so that users will get an email when they area assigned to an issue or when someone has added a comment to an issue that is assigned to them. You can set up notifications as you wish. Users can also "watch" particular issues and be emailed whenever anything changes. You can even email JIRA to open a new issue or add a comment and email attachment to an issue.

Issue numbers are related directly to the project via a 3-4 letter prefix. For example, you might have a project called "IT Administration" and a project called "Worldwide Enterprises Project", which will have a prefix of IT and WWE respectively. Issues in IT will start IT-1, IT-2 etc. and issues in WWE will start WWE-1, WWE-2 etc. so it's easy to know what project an issue relates to. You will find the team with a new vocabulary of words like WWE-193 and IT-22 arising in every sentence.

Users can log work against issues and time tracked.

Workflow

The Enterprise version has a number of tools that allow you to create and change the workflow, however we opted for the standard which uses a good workflow.

With the standard, an issue is Open when it is created. Once a developer starts work on it, they can change it to In Progress, unless its a small issue that is completed in less than 30 minutes - they can then just go straight to Resolve.

I have set it so that only myself and QA can Close an issue, but anyone can Reopen it for any reason.

Issues are never deleted, only closed.

Issues can be Resolved in a number of ways and the user is presented with the following in the Standard JIRA, the other JIRA versions allow you to add to or change these :

• Fixed (default) : A fix for this issue has been completed to the satisfaction of the user
• Won’t Fix : The problem described is an issue which will never be fixed (e.g. the issue relates to a previous version and the workaround its to upgrade)
• Duplicate : The problem is a duplicate of an existing issue (user can link the issue to another)
• Incomplete : The problem is not completely described. Used only if the creator of the issue cannot supply any further information (i.e. the creator is no longer available or all attempts to contacted have failed).
  Normally, if the problem is not described correctly, it is up to the user to reassign the issue back to the creator with more questions as comments
• Cannot Reproduce : All attempts at reproducing this issue failed, or not enough information was available to reproduce the issue. Reading the code produces no clues as to why this behaviour would occur. If more information appears later, the issue may be reopened.

Searching

Users have two ways that they can search for an issue or comment.

"Quick Search" is a seemingly insignificant little search box up the top right of the screen that is extremely powerful. Type anything into there (like "VPN Connection") and JIRA will do a very fast search of all its issues and give you a list of all issues contain that word or phrase. If you know the JIRA number, just type it in and you'll be taken directly to the issue.

"Find Issues" is a menu item that allows you to find issues by creating a Filter. Filters can be created on the fly, saved to a name (e.g. "All Unresolved Development Issues"). JIRA will automatically add a Filter to show you all issues currently assigned to you.

Setting up these Filters is a simple idea of selecting from the list of selections for the fields to search, for example, selecting 1 or more projects to search. Other areas in this search is the Query on the Summary, Description and Comments fields. Query is a reasonably powerful search facility explained Here. Date and time fields have the ability to enter either specific dates, or relative dates (within the last x hours/days, in range from/to). This allows me to, for example, set up a filter to report on all JIRA issues created last month (don't tell my boss that my monthly management reporting is that easy).

When you activate or view a Filter, it shows in a list that you can scroll through and export to Excel or Word, and

Filters can be set up to appear on your JIRA Portal.

The JIRA Portal

The front screen in JIRA can be set up differently by each user. You can add, delete, and move items around the screen to suit yourself. You can add Filters that you created yourself and add pre-set Portlets. These include such things as Project Stats; Admin functions; Filter Stats; My Watched Issues; and Issues in Progress. These can be arranged as you like with the most used Portlets showing at the top of the screen.

My own Portlet shows some details about projects; lists all my save Filters; Overdue Issues; Issues update within the last 8 hours; Resolved issues awaiting me to Close; Issues I'm watching; My assigned issues; and a few of the available graphs that I got from a free JIRA Plugin available from the Atlassian website.

Using JIRA

After using JIRA now for a few months I can honestly say that I have resolved a number of team issues here. I know what is happening; what the team is working on; issues are tracked and comments are added as new information comes in or things are done; the developers and BA can fully understand issues with a place to keep documents, screenshots and comments; work can be prioritised; and everyone can see what work lies ahead of them.

Nothing gets forgotten; work is logged against issues; issues are assigned to others where necessary within the workflow; and management reporting is completed.

The Down Side

Of course there's a downside -  it costs real money. JIRA comes in Standard, Professional and Enterprise editions costing US$1,200, US$2,400 and US$4,800 respectively. While I would have loved the Enterprise edition, we are getting by quite nicely on the Standard edition.

You will have to keep on top of it when you first install it as there is a mind-set that says "I've assigned this issue to someone else, it's no longer my problem". It's also easy to simply ignore issues assigned to you and then get upset when you have hundreds of issues in front of you.

Summary

As I said, "JIRA works". Sometimes it comes down to that. As a Development Manager I can trust it, the developers trust it, and everyone in the company trusts it.

Try it out for free on your server for a month or two. They'll extend the free trial if you ask them nicely, but I don't think you'll need it. It's so nice to find nice people who actually support and use their product themselves.

 

Just a quick note: I have no affiliation with JIRA\Atlassian . I don't know anyone there and I don't get anything free from them .. although a tee-shirt wouldn't go astray (HINT HINT Atlassian - Grin).

Tools for the Development Team - SourceForge

SourceForge

SourceForge (http://sf.net/powerbar/sfee/) was the real contender against Jira and we took a good hard look at it, putting it through its paces. The price (free for less than 15 users) was a compelling argument, as was its document storage and version control of those documents. We installed it on a server here and the team had a play. The following are our findings.

Initially we found SourceForge (SF) very slow. This was perhaps related to the fact it was set up as a virtual machine. This also meant that it was many gigs to download.

There was a small learning curve, same as any new product I suppose. The one thing that threw me immediately was that Tasks is not the area you place issues. Within a project, you can "create" new Trackers, and its in that new tracker area off the Main Menu where you can now track issues, or "Artifacts" as SF calls them. I'm not sure that I like the term 'artifact' as I don't want issues buried for centuries for some scientist to dig up to find out how we performed our work.

You create fields or use the defaults, you can categorise tracker items and the items are also colour coded to show their priority. You can even ask tracker to auto assign different categories to different people. While the auto assignments worked very well, I wanted to auto assign depending on the development process - e.g. auto assign to me all new issues and I can then distribute them to the available team member, then auto assign to QA when the issue is resolved. However, this is another system and what it offers is good.

SourceForge has several areas of concentration:

• Tracker - an issues register
• Documents - a document control system where company and technical documents can be stored, and a sort of version control is applied (more about that shortly)
• Tasks - These are project tasks as opposed to software issues.
• Source Code - links to Subversion or other source/version control systems
• Discussion - a nice discussion forum with threaded messages
• Reports
• Release Packages
• Wiki
• Project Admin

Documents

The document control was a really nice feature that we gave high marks to. I can add folders and sub folders and place documents in them, just like Windows. The main difference here is that when I go back and add updated files into the same folders, instead of overwriting the files as Windows does, SF treats the newer files as new versions of the older files. I can then review previous versions, almost like I was in a Version Control program.

Discussions

The SF discussion forums were a nice touch. You can associate a discussion with a tracker artifact, people can reply to discussions and you

can select to "watch" a particular discussion to get an email when someone adds to the discussion. You can also have it automatically sending out to a mailing list.

There were a couple of downsides to the discussions. When replying to a comment, you can not see the discussion you are replying to. This will surely cause a lot of mis-quoting. Also, it seems that the user is unable to edit their own discussion after posting so even if they find they have misquoted, they can't edit that to change it. While I can understand not being able to change a comment if another has replied, surely you can edit to change that spelling mistake or typo you noticed in that frozen moment after you press save and before it was redisplayed.

File Releases

It is a convenient tool to package files in a patch set. You could upload all the files needed for a patch and when pressing the downloading release button, it saves all files into a zip file. Good for patches but I'm uncertain for major releases.

Reports

Reports can be defined to report on any searchable criteria. A standard report of a graphical summary and the report detail will then be generated. Reports can be on Tasks (project) or Tracker Artifacts.

Wiki

The Wiki was a disappointment. It was a simple and very basic Wiki without even the ability to add graphics other than as a URL. It has a different command set than I was used to but as it was so limiting, it wouldn't take long to learn.

General

It had a nice interface and some nice additions when compared with Jira, however when even after 2 weeks the company still could not reply to even a standard sales enquiry (sent by two of us separately), we were left wondering about the likelihood of any response to a real support query. That was the real clincher as far as we were concerned. Sadly, we dropped SourceForge from our list.

Tools for the Development Team (2)

To continue where I left off, the management team, of which I am a member, looked at Jira in a totally different manner. Each person had their own needs for a tool ever so slightly different to Jira. This caused some problems as I was then asked to evaluate a number of other tools that, perhaps with some compromise, everyone can use. Some suggestions were forthcoming and I dutifully took at look at each one.

The problem with the approach that I made to the management team was that I had obviously failed to impress what the development team needed in the tool. You see, I was out to sell the tool to the rest of the company and in doing so I was focusing on their needs instead of the development team's. This meant that instead of learning how the development team were going to contribute and communicate better, they were thinking "how can I use this new tool", which invariably led to "I need this tool to do X, and I know one that does X much better than this". Of course, that meant that they were thinking of their own needs and Jira just didn't cut it for them. Dang, I missed the plot there.

I got suggestions to consider like Phpaga (http://www.phpaga.net). This is an excellent tool for contacts, invoices, financials, and billing tasks, but it has little to nothing to do with the development process. After discussing this and writing up a small review for the management team I suggested that a CRM package was more in line. They have one so will look again at using it effectively.

Almost all applications I looked at served a single particular purpose, and added some other purposes somewhere along the scale of between "ok" and "that really sucks".

So lesson learned. What I should have done is sold it as a development tool. I could have shown the management team how much better the development team was going to be, how much more accountable, how they will now get both statistics and answers from this bunch of strange speaking weirdos that did things magical and totally unknown things that produced the final products. Now they might understand what's going on there and the tool will be well supported.

As I stated in my last post, I have a number of tools that I will touch on briefly over the next few posts, but as you might have guessed, we have finally decided on Jira. Surprisingly that decision was not made by me. The development team were also asked to review a few of the more successful tools and give their feedback but it was their own decision that we should go with Jira. While Jira did not have the nicest interface or the best reports, and it was only an issues register, it was voted in as the tool to use.

Tools for the Development Team

We placed Jira onto our live server and began using it for real about 2 weeks ago now. So how's it going? Rather well as it turns out.

(Jira is from Atlassian (http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/) and is an issue tracker tool, see earlier posts for discussions.)

I did a demo for the Development Team and they took to it like a duck to water, now that they understood what it's used for and how. I did the same for the rest of the Management Team and they took to it as well, but in a different way.

Initially it was not used as well as I'd have liked so I put a little pressure on the team by being a bit of a pain in the neck for a couple of days..

Me: "What are you working on?"

Developer: "I'm updating xyz here that needs a new abc because Freda from WxyCorp has found a glitch with it"

Me: "I don't see this in Jira, have you added it?"

Developer: "Um... (ticidatacida) .. I have now (grin)"

Me: "Oh, OK then. You know that if you are working on anything, no matter what it is, it .."

Developer: ".. yea yea, I know, - ..'it needs to be in Jira' (sigh)"

The developers are good guys and they really understood the reasons for putting everything in Jira but being developers, they wanted to just develop. Now I note that no-one is working on anything without a Jira issue and they themselves police that nicely by suggesting that others create a Jira issue before they can start on any work. Nice.

This means of course, that all work is logged and reporting and reviewing can be carried out. Issues are assigned to others with questions when more information is needed, and they get an email to tell them when the issue is reassigned back to them with the answer. Once the have completed the work, they "Resolve" the issue and assign it to the QA Manager. Only the QA Manager and myself as Administrator, can "Close" an issue.

The Management Team has been impressed with Jira but they all have their own ideas of other tools that would work better for what they want to do. Some other tools that I have looked at are...

• SourceForge Enterprise - http://sf.net/powerbar/sfee/
• Trac - http://trac.edgewall.org/
• Mingle - http://studios.thoughtworks.com/mingle-project-intelligence
• Confluence - http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/
• FDDTracker - http://www.itps.com.au/dotnetnuke/

Other areas I have also look at with a mind to solving some other issues here, they include...

• TrueCrypt - http://www.truecrypt.org/
• AllSync - http://www.allsync.biz/help/a_produktbeschreibung.htm
• SyncToy - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/prophoto/synctoy.mspx

and I'll hope to have others added to that list soon.

I'll talk on each of those and our eventual decisions as I go along in other posts. In the meantime, I'd like to hear what tools you are using with your team or even on your own to help with development and running a software team.

Installing Jira - The Development Support Tool

We are a relatively small (less than 20 employees) software development house with about half a dozen mainline products as well as any number of consulting projects going on. We have some very big name clients in several countries and therefore need to ensure work is completed on time and efficiently.

While there are normal enhancement projects and major installation projects going on, there are also a number of items that come up for customers wanting changes or where something doesn't go quite as planned. These can disrupt the programmers day and disturb the development of future enhancements or otherwise frustrate the project timelines.

We have a web based system for clients to record requests and log bugs. This is monitored by our support staff and an email is fired off to developers where necessary.

All this means that as more emails come in, the developer has to judge the urgency of the email and either drop everything to perform that task, or note that this is another item that he has to do in the future. While they are very good at what they do, I was concerned for several reasons.

1. I don't have a view on what a developer is doing at any time, or what he has done
2. I don't have any way to tell what the workload of a particular developer is. This means I don't know to spread the load between developers when one is overloaded and another is just doing some normal housework
3. Programmers can easily forget tasks
4. It doesn't assist in any process to development
5. I can't plan to ensure enough resources are available.
6. I could go on, but you get the idea...

Generally though, it makes the whole development area invisible to me as the manager.

I knew that I needed to install a development process, but I knew immediately, I needed a tool to give me the visibility on what's being worked on work to correctly design a development process. I had used Jira before so the decision was an easy one for me. Setting it up was easy and done in minutes, but I wanted a number of changes to the permission and notification schemes, then it was a matter if creating some projects. Done.

It worked well and I installed a testing project so that people can try out the system without disturbing real work.

Its been installed now for about a week but the uptake has not been immediate. I'll have to do a demo on Monday to show everyone how it works, assure them that its not going to take over their day with mundane admin tasks, and finally show them a few neat wow bits. After that I'll be enforcing the use of it for the next month.

If, after that trial, no-one is convinced, then I'll take it away, but I'll need to know what to replace it with if that is the case. There seems to be a few main problems with installing this work request system that I'll have to overcome. These include:

• It seems like more work for no reason. While it may take a minute or less to create a new Jira issue, there are huge benefits for the user, the company, and the client - get over it.
• Its a way for the boss to monitor my work so he can breathe down my neck. In fact, its a way to STOP the boss breathing down your neck as he can see what's going on instead of bugging you every half hour. As for monitoring, your not that interesting that I want to spend all my time "monitoring" what you are doing "right now", I'm a lot busier than that but a quick glance to review workloads will tell me if you have too much work and need help.
• I get lots of little emails from lots of people wanting me to do things that only take a minute or two, why should I have to put all these into Jira?. By putting these into Jira, these little jobs will not only show you how much time they take up, but you will never, ever forget to do them. I have set up an email for each project in Jira, simply forward to the email to that address and it'll create your Jira issue instantly.
• I'm a senior developer, surely "I" don't have to do this. Yes, sadly I'm afraid that you do.

I'm sure that once everyone is using it and the advantages are being seen, then it'll resolve any arguments. To be fair, no argument have been forthcoming, but I can sense what's not being said at times. They are a great bunch or people that I enjoy working with, I just think I can make life easier for them with this tool. I'll let you know how it goes.

Back again

Thanks for your patience, I have finally shifted house and started my new role as Software Development Manager for a software house in Hamilton.

The shift included a few days in Wellington visiting friends and generally spending time away. Holidays have been a very rare occurrence for me, having at one time, spent more than 12 years without a holiday, I find that taking a break occasionally is a requirement.

The new role is interesting. Based on Oracle technologies the product is a very stable and sizeable system. The team contains some excellent technical expertise and I will be working hard to install some processes and a decent methodology to ensure that they are supported as much as possible.

That's all for now as I'm still finding my feet here.

Practical Development Methodologies

Over the years I have designed and installed a number of development methodologies into various organisations (I'll not list them here). What I'm interested in is a description of the development methodology that is adopted by your company, why, and how well its working.

I'd also like to know your description of the development method, not just the company's blurb sheet. For example, I was once working for a company who was the major client of a software development company. I was asked to report on the development methodology that the software company had adopted and how well it was working in favour of the client.

The company, like a great many others I know, proudly advertised their methodology as "Agile". Agile is not itself a methodology but rather a concept. There are a number of methodologies which come within the concept of "Agile". Upon investigation, the company was operating under "Iterative and Incremental Development" (IID). After getting to know both the development company, and the client, I was able to report that the IID methodology worked exceedingly well for both the development company, and their major client in this case.

In most of the methodologies I have installed, I have yet to install a stock-standard, out of the book methodology. I much prefer to look at several areas within the company I am contract to, to ensure a good fit. These areas include:

• How the programming team currently works, what works well and what needs improvement.
  
• The major applications that the team completes, e.g. large developments that take longer than 6 months to deliver, or daily support and enhancements to legacy applications.
  
• The major clients of the team. This may be serving in-house applications (in which case the customer may be another business area) or small, large, or corporate external customers. each has its own unique needs.
  
• The slant that management wants to portray to the outside world.
  
• Both the history and the perceived future of the development team.
  
• The history and quality of the delivered products.
  
• The location and proximity of the team. For example, some companies I have worked with perform all their development in India with local staff consisting of Business Analysis and Technical Architects. Others have split their development team between two cities.
  
• The makeup of the team. Some teams may have 'prima donna' programmers that simply will not conform to changes unless they are subtle or suit their own needs.
  

All these will have an effect on the eventual development methodology that will be designed and installed.

One example of a change to the standard methodology was where I designed and installed a standard Waterfall methodology to cope with external programmers, but changed the process to be used for Functions, instead of whole applications. This reduced the time it took for the external programmers to return their first cut that could be tested and, where necessary, returned for minor alterations. This meant that for any application there were several waterfalls operating at any one time. A sort of RAD-ified, or even XP'd Waterfall.

So what's your advertised methodology? What's your actual methodology? How well does it work for the team? And how well does it work for the client/customer?

You don't need to tell me the company you work for, and in most cases it may not be prudent.

Different Programming Styles

I was reading Serge’s Blog on Programmers and Temperaments this morning and it reminded me of a project I did for a company in Wellington once. It was a large international company (no, I'm not going to tell you which) and they had a very large project that they needed to produce. The project was technically difficult requiring a lot of thought each step of the way.

After a lot of design by their chief software architect, they called for programmers. About twelve of us were hired for this one project and it was really fun to get to work with a number of others on one project like that. We were given regular daily meetings to try to bring us all up to speed on the technical requirements, and then shown to a large, open plan room with a computer on each desk to choose our own work area.

What was most interesting though was a discussion that I was having with the project manager about a week later. He commented on the work styles of each of the programmers from the perspective of an observer. This wasn't a moan or gossip session, but a discussion on a real observation.

After all the meetings and the whiteboard sessions were over, we all drifted into the desks and work practices we wanted. The project manager observed the following different styles...

I found my niche in a corner desk that was on its own, then got out my pad and spent the next 2 days planning what and how I was to approach my part of the project, before I even touched the keyboard. I wanted to completely understand the requirements (which were mostly in the architect's head, given out on the whiteboard sessions). Once I understood and had a clear plan, then it was a matter of programming.

Two others immediately grabbed two desks that were joined to each other so they were sitting side by side, then simply pulled one chair over to the other desk to together at the same desk, one computer between them, and designed and programmed together. They needed to talk through what they were doing and help each other plan and program. Occasionally the second programmer would move to the computer on the other desk to program a sample procedure to help explain to the other his thoughts on a subject.

Another programmer sat down at the first available desk and started pounding out code. He needed to try out various prototypes and work from there, building up his code as he went.

Various others worked somewhere along the spectrum of the above three different styles. Some couldn't handle it and after a few days left for greener and much easier pastures.

What was interesting over the following several months was the general effectiveness of the different styles. I (admittedly somewhat surprisingly as there were some seriously experienced programmers that I enjoyed working with) ended up producing the end result much faster, followed by the pair/buddy approach. The person who immediately started coding, had to change and restart so many times that he turned out to be the least effective.

I'd love to hear your comments on what you have found in your experiences.