Saw a brief interview clip from +Martin D'Sousa, Board Member of ODTUG, who talks about some of the aspects of building a better development team. His take is that if you look at a company's internal software development problems as a pyramid with the smallest part (the top) being the most difficult problems and the bottom, wider part consisting of smaller, simpler problems to solve there is a strategy that will help the organization overall. By addressing the smaller, simpler problems D'Sousa suggests, one will notice that the more difficult ones will be less and less frequent.
What are some of the common things one can do to address this "simpler problem" approach? Agreeing on coding standards such as formatting and code reviews to share learning and cross train team members on various projects. These things are relatively easy to do and can help a team by reducing ambiguity of the simple problems and freeing up developers to focus on creativity in solving the more important problems at hand. The important part D'Sousa explains is that the team is "on the same page" and is in agreement with basic issues related to their development responsibilities.
I agree with much of this approach from my own experience because I see that many of the more complicated and difficult issues facing an organization's software development teams are only symptomatic of much simpler but cumulative problems. If you systematize and standardize the solutions for these simpler problems, many of the typical complications can and do disappear.
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