Code Obsession

So you've probably heard this ancient aphorism, but what does it have to do with software development? Very few of us deliver software in isolation. We generally have customers, managers, testers, designers, operations, and fellow developers on our development and delivery teams. Because we have to interact with all of these other people, it is in our best interest to know who we are, what motivates us, and what our strengths and weaknesses are. For the last couple of years, I have intermixed a few books and videos on psychology with my standard technical fare in an effort to get to know myself better. It appears that many in our industry are doing the same. At the Agile Alliance 2011 conference, Dr. Barbara Fredrickson spoke about Why Care about Positive Emotions? . Linda Rising has spoken about The Agile Mindset at several conferences including Agile Roots 2012. At the recent WindyCityRails conference, Steve Klabnik spoke on Development and Philosophy . And many members of m...

What follows are three stories of actual distributed teams that I have been on. These are my stories and my version of events. Others involved may tell different tales. · · · A Tragedy in 3 Acts Act I The Scene It was my first agile project! I didn't know it though. None of us knew what we were doing, but we knew that anything that got in the way of satisfying our customers had to go. We were pretty good. We were so good, in fact, that our corporate entity took control of the project. The Team With two developers, our field-support/QA person, and our saleswoman/business expert, this was a small, tight team who enjoyed strong support from our executive sponsor. The Tools The developers employed a tactic of working together (we might call it pairing now). We released more than once a week and we all worked directly with our customers daily. We also met daily to discuss sales, installations, features, and bugs. How it Felt It felt amazing. We had many happy customers and we wo...