Characteristics of an efficient engineering team

An efficient engineering team offers a fun and challenging place to work at. From my personal experience the following mindset forms the basis of such a team.

We truly care about things

• Caring means acting
• Caring means pushing things forward
• Caring means questioning ideas, concepts and decisions
• Caring means listening to customer feedback
• Caring means answering questions and providing feedback in time
• Caring means continually monitoring project progress
• We are pragmatic while caring about things

Failures happen, but we are able to quickly analyze, find and fix them

• Logging helps us in analyzing and finding bugs quickly (without long-lasting debugging sessions)
• Simple and elegant design help us in fixing problems instantly as well as in maintaining and refactoring our code base without fear
• Tooling is very important to achieve fast bug fixing turnaround times

We communicate openly

• Open communication means keeping others informed
• Open communication works like a push system, not like a pull system
• Open communication must no result in overstimulation by steady interruptions

To understand is to invent

• We keep asking why and question until we understand all the stuff
• Understanding all the code and technologies is a prerequisite to quality

Best Practices

• Strive for simplicity
• Keep an eye out for beauty and aesthetics in your code base no matter if it is about architecture, naming or something else
• Reduce risk by integrating early and often
• Read code, review code! By reading code one learns so much, both from the good and the bad parts of the code base
• Fail fast, but don't give up too easily