The Blog

Group norms

published March 26, 2010

Kari “Poppis” Suomela is a finnish polar explorer and today I had a privilege to participate to a seminar where he was speaking about his conquests to north and south pole. Only eleven others had skied to both poles unsupported and unassisted before him, so he is what I consider a “tough dude”.

In his speech he told one thing that was very interesting in terms of group norms. He told that before the trip, whole group undergoes same training program in order to avoid conflict later. Even though explorers all start from different levels, during training period each one is making a similar investment in terms of practicing. This way they can completely drop discussions about who cut training and who not while skiing on ice raft. According to Poppis, it is important that all unnecessary conflicts can be avoided.

So what are they actually doing in terms of social psychology? Firstly, They are increasing group cohesion by setting a bar high for members, which is one way to increase group cohesion. Group members will value membership more when their investment for a membership is high. Secondly, they are setting a group norm against whining, so that they can concentrate on important things.

Effective group norms are very important for technology teams also. For example, if group has not agreed on their values or definition of done, their process will be a mess which will cause unnecessary stress later in a project. If everyone have agreed that in order to mark task done, code has to be reviewed first, there will be much less whining because the team has established a norm for valuing high quality. This way it is much easier to succeed with code reviews and avoid situations where e.g. someone will not want to show his code. However, group must decide these norms by them selves and this will not work when norms are forced from outside.

For more information about polar exploring, go to www.thepole.fi

Samuli @ 17:58 (No Comments)

tags: Group dynamics, Social psychology

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Importance of a coach

published March 23, 2010

During yesterday’s morning exercise I once again realized importance of a coach. When you feel like giving up, you will need someone to kick your fat ass forward because you definitely can do one more. And then one after that. While sweating with weights, trainer kept pushing me forward. And push I did.

In IT projects we encounter same challenges. We have a defined process in place and we know what we should do but it is easy to cut corners and start slipping. To keep a team on a track, the process must be followed. If the process does not work, it must be redesigned. In addition, we must always try to move forward towards greater value and better productivity because if we are not moving forward, we are sliding backwards.

I know some teams that are doing “Scrum” but without daily scrums. I believe that this is a first sign of a lazy team. I also believe that a lazy team is not building a great product. If the team does not have a discipline to follow a simple process, can you realistically expect that the team is writing good unit tests and actively sparring a product owner? I do not think so.

So whose job it is to see that process is followed in Scrum? Thats right, it is yours, dear Scrum Master. You are the coach who is pushing team forward. It is your job to cheer for the team and keep pushing them forward.

Samuli @ 22:58 (No Comments)

tags: Process, Quality, Scrum

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What a day

published March 16, 2010

Today was an excellent day. Our team members where busy on other projects, in training and some lucky ones where on vacation. This special occasion gave me an opportunity for serious hacking in our war room. It must have been over two years ago since I had a day like this. In “proper” agile projects, Scrum master will inevitably be interrupted multiple times per day, if not, there is something lurking beneath the surface. So, a quiet day like this is a rare treat for me.

I spent my day test driving Thoughtworks Twist, configuring Bamboo and getting it to build Webtests written in Groovy. I also configured a bamboo widget to show build status on Jira dashboard and enhanced our development environment by configuring jRebel to Liferay. This stuff is better to be in order when doing serious development. Personally, I think that all this stuff should be bought from a cloud vendor and it is kind of 1999 to install team tools by yourself. Reality, however, is that many organizations are still hosting services by them selves. I would like to see a one-click development environment cloud services, that could generate a whole development environment for you with just one mouse click. Atlassian’s Jira Studio is moving into this direction but idea I am after is more like Jira Studio combined with Google app engine. Oh well, maybe some day.

Samuli @ 22:06 (No Comments)

tags: This is great

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Whatever happened to programming

published March 13, 2010

There is a discussion about Whatever happened to programming at TheServerSide.com. It is a fact that programming nowadays is more like gluing components together to solve a problem than coding low level data structures from scratch. Some people are seeing this as a bad thing and feel that programming has become monotonic and uninventive. However, we must remember the real reason why we are writing the code (or gluing the components) in the first place.

Every single line we write should have a valid business reason to exist. Every line should have a measurable ROI for the business, which is of course very hard to measure, but this kind of thinking should be reasoning behind all actions taken in a project. As size of our problems increase we must increase our level of working as well as our producivity. The program code is not written for programmers, it is written for the business. For the business, quality and productivity matter way more than the fact that a programmer might feel his job monotonic. Tough luck, there are about billion future coders in China, someone will be interested. I feel that software developers in general should be more interested in business ROI than they currently are.

Samuli @ 18:56 (No Comments)

tags: Business, Lean, Productivity

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Women

published March 8, 2010

As today is the international women’s day, it seems like a proper time to say few words about women in IT projects. Unfortunately, it is not commonplace to have women participating software implementation in Finland. In most cases that I have worked with women, they have been working as project managers, testers or UI designers and only few have worked as software developers. What ever their role have been, their presence has brought positive effects to team dynamics. Do not get me wrong, I do not mind working with real sweaty Neanderthal-type men, but it feels like a fresh breeze to work through problems with opposite gender. That is why I wish to see more software-ladies with multi-tasking brains working with IT. Happy women’s day!

Samuli @ 21:07 (No Comments)

tags: Group dynamics

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The rush of starting a new project

published March 5, 2010

I started a new project this week. It seems that customers are rising the bar for consultants, since this contract needed a solid CV, passed psychological tests, and a successful interview with the customer. Luckily I got the job and there is always something special in starting a new project. The feeling of beginning to build something great is always a pleasant one. Technologies this year seem to be circling around JEE, SOA, Liferay, Javascript, and Open Geospatial Consortium standards, such as WMS and WFS.

Samuli @ 18:20 (No Comments)

tags: Business, Customer

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