Comments on: Software Teams Must Gel

By: Symphonious » Telecommuting And Ephox

Symphonious » Telecommuting And Ephox — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 05:43:39 +0000

[...] In a comment on Software Teams Must Gel, James C. McPherson asks: [...]

By: James C. McPherson

James C. McPherson — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 03:24:55 +0000

Given your brief description of the Ephox interview process, it would appear that you’re not in favour of people who work from home or are even more remote from your office. I’ve spent a long time working with remote management and geographically distributed teams.

There is, of course, no solitary correct solution, attitude or approach to building and gelling a successful software engineering or development team. I would be interested to find out what the Ephox perspective in on remoteness.
James

By: Adrian Sutton

Adrian Sutton — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 10:32:13 +0000

I think you have a strange understanding of pair programming. You don’t have one person picking on the other - you have two people working together, one looking at the finer detail and one looking at the higher level directions. If you think it’s fun to pick on coding errors you’re not doing XP right and you’re not in a gelled team. Certainly in some cases you’ll laugh at a common error that you’ve both made - at Ephox we seem to have logic dyslexia - but that’s the pair laughing at their mistake, not one person laughing at the other’s.

Having food in the area can be a good thing and can be bad - fruit is good, sugary or fatty foods just lead to afternoon lows. If you have food around to try to avoid the team leaving to have lunch, you’re probably just going to burn them out. Taking a good lunch break to relax and chat with your work mates is really important both from a team building perspective but also from the perspective of keeping fresh and energetic about your work.

By: KrisB

KrisB — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 10:10:23 +0000

It seems to me that one should feel sorry for those subjected to paired programming XP.

I have noticed how quick it can be to have one person developing as fast as their brain can function and a second debugging along the way. It is so fun making light of other peoples coding errors too! However, in these environments you also need to get as well as give as when the next week rolls around and you reverse roles the fun will be poked at you too!

Supplemental to this - how is it that really productive development teams seem to have a constant supply of food in their area?? Odd perhaps, but food helps!