Saturday, March 11, 2017

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

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