Coding to Music

On Team “Gelling”…

Posted October 16th, 2008 by garrinmf Had a great talk this evening @ the indy alt.net gathering. It was a fishbowl style meeting on ‘Team Dynamics’. Talked about many aspects of the different interactions that occur in the software development cycle and heard different perspectives on them.

At one point the conversation meandered to a point where it was logical to ask the question, “Well how do you gel a team?”. I can’t remember all the things that were said but I definitely don’t remember anybody saying anything about time. A good team that knows one another, works well with each other, and has achieved the mythical state of ‘gelled’ has almost always worked together for awhile. And by awhile I mean multiple years, not just an iteration or two, maybe a project or two. You have your ’stars’ that when put together can appear to be an awesome team from day one but give it time and be amazed. I don’t care if you don’t even like your coworkers, after a year or two of working with them you know what they can and can’t do. You work better together and are more productive (if you haven’t started choking each other that is).

Next time you and the other ‘higher ups’ are standing around the drinking fountain and one of you complains about how your favorite NFL team just fired their 3rd coach in as many years and say they never gave any of them a chance, remember the same holds true in development teams. After a single project they’ve barely learned the playbook, it takes time to start reading each others moves.

Edit: After a discussion with jon-boy, I'm making the following addendum to the post: "...you can tell in the short term, whether long term it's going to be a GELLED team...or the team is going to gel a little whether whether they like each other or not...."