Managing a development team is something that takes time to learn. There are a few key components that a team lead should manage to deal with on a daily basis. As a manager of software teams – you should be making sure that your team leads are doing these things.

Basic agenda

• Deliver working software as rapidly as possible
• Expect constant changes in:
• Requirements
• Dates
• People
• Don’t give features the users do not want
• Prioritize features
• Deliver iteratively
• Keep constant communication with all team members and the stakeholders

Team management

• Check task list progress
• Consider mentorship goals for team members
• Check software metrics
• LOC growth/ shrinkage
• Code Coverage
• Test suite status

Communication up the organization

• Communicate metrics, status
• Get directives, changes, etc

Communication with the users or user proxies

• Check in frequently with questions of details etc. Since we should be defering details to the last responsible moment – these chats are key.

Impromptu meetings/ Modeling sessions with dev team

• This is architecting as a group. Get a few folks to model out part of the software solution.
• Consider larger refactorings in concert.

Code Review

• Review developers work
• Review total solution’s integrity, isolate areas of concern

Pairing/ Solo Coding

• pull task from list
• Consider usage, write initial tests
• Write code to satisfy tests

Pairing Guidelines

• Alternate driving
• Switch pairs partners at least 2x per day

Coding guidelines

• Have a team code standard – enforce it
• Seperate interface from implementation
• Practice IoC
• Write side effect free routines whenever you can
• Name methods, variables and classes approprate to their tasks
• Makes classes for 1 purpose
• Make methods for 1 purpose
• Refactor code as you go

Unit testing guidelines

• Test everything – goal is to cover all code
• Only instantiate your ONE test class as a concrete class.
• All other classes that the CUT (Class Under Test) depends on should be mocked

Task guidelines

• Tasks should be less than 1/2 day in length – preferably much shorter
• Tasks should be detailed
• Tasks must reference the user story, use case, feature, bug etc that they address.
• Tasks must be executed in time boxes

Infrastructure/ Tools

• Make sure the team has the tools required – they are probably cheaper than more developers
• MUST HAVE INFRASTRUCURE
• Seperate development, QA/ UAT, Production environments (machines, databases, etc)
• Continuous integration process
• Source Control
• xUnit
• Wiki for team details
• Simple Bug/ Feature Tracking
• At least Simple Static analysis software
• At least Simple code metrics software

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