This resource first appeared in issue #99 on 05 Nov 2021
and has tags Technical Leadership: Software Development, Technical Leadership: Other
Well-researched advice on software team productivity - Ari-Pekka Koponen, Swarmia
Management is hard, management of something as complex and ambiguous as software development is especially hard, but that doesn’t mean we don’t know anything. There has been a lot of research on what works for making teams work well, and recently particularly in the area of software development. It doesn’t mean there are cookie-cutter solutions for anything, but we do have good guidelines. Koponen walks us through several well-supported (and in some cases ongoing) reports, many of which RCT readers will have already known about
- Project Aristotle (#46) - The follow up to Google’s Project Oxygen, going beyond the effect of single managers to team behaviours. They found that five factors were very strongly correlated with high performing teams
- Psychological safety - team members feeling comfortable speaking up
- Dependability of other team members
- Structure and clarity
- Work having meaning, and
- Work having impact
- DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics - These are aimed for those developing and operating software systems, but many of them are relevant to those writing and releasing software: they find that teams that are performing well have:
- High deployment frequency - it’s easy to update the software and keep it working
- Low Mean Lead Time for Changes
- Low Change Failure Rate for changes to need to be rolled back
- Low Time to Recovery for the times that errors do occur
- SPACE (#66) found that focussing on these five areas were important for self-reported high-performing teams:
- Satisfaction and well-being
- Performance
- Activity
- Communication & Collaboration
- Efficiency & Flow
And most importantly, Retrospectives - learning and adapting practices based on what is actually happening on your team - allows you to tune.
