Maximizing Developer Effectiveness - Tim Cochran

This resource first appeared in issue #57 on 15 Jan 2021 and has tags Technical Leadership: Software Development, Managing Your Career: Productivity

Maximizing Developer Effectiveness - Tim Cochran

This is aimed at software developers, but much of it would apply just as easily to those running systems or curating research data. Team members are effective if they’re quickly and frequently getting feedback - did this change work, does this solution meet the requestor’s needs - and not waiting for things or having their day chopped up into little pieces.

That means as managers it’s important to make sure we have the tooling and processes in place to get team members their results quickly, have things ready to show users/stakeholders quickly, and be respectful of their time. Because the pace of research is generally relatively slow and fitful, we tend in research computing not to make this a focus - but team members can only move at the speed of their tools and processes.