Debugging Teams: Better Productivity through Collaboration

by Brian W. Fitzpatrick

The more feedback you solicit early on, the more you lower this risk.2 Remember the tried-and-true mantra of “Fail early, fail fast, fail often” — we’ll discuss the importance of failure at length later in the book. Early sharing isn’t just about preventing personal missteps and getting your ideas vetted. It’s also important to strengthen what we call the bus factor of your project. Bus factor (noun): the number of people that need to get hit by a bus before your project is completely doomed.

Working with other people directly increases the collective wisdom behind the effort.

“Many eyes make sure your project stays relevant and on track.”

Almost every social conflict can ultimately be traced back to a lack of humility, respect, or trust.

every member of your team participates in the culture and bears some responsibility for defining, maintaining, and defending the culture.

A good general rule around communication is to include as few people as necessary in synchronous communication (like meetings and phone calls), and to go for a broader audience in asynchronous communication (like email, issue trackers, and document comments).

In addition, once you’ve nailed down the design doc, it will serve as your guide for both scheduling and dividing the work on your project. Once you start coding, however, you should treat your design doc as a living document and not one carved in stone: you and your team should update the document as your project grows and changes, not once you’ve shipped, although this is easier said than done. Most teams have no docs at all, while the rest have a short period of awesome docs, followed by a long period of out-of-date docs.

Comments should be focused on why the code is doing what it’s doing, not what the code is doing.

A good Three Bullets and a Call to Action email contains (at most) three bullet points detailing the issue at hand, and one — and only one — call to action. That’s it, nothing more — you need to write an email that can be easily forwarded along.

Do the right thing, wait to get fired New Google employees (we call “Nooglers”) often ask me what makes me effective at what I do. I tell them only half-jokingly that it’s very simple: I do the Right Thing for Google and the world, and then I sit back and wait to get fired. If I don’t get fired, I’ve done the Right Thing for everyone. If I do get fired, this is the wrong employer to work for in the first place. So, either way, I win. That is my career strategy.

The moral here is that when you’re considering your users, think hard about who your audience is. Is your work usable by the biggest group possible? This is why simple and thoughtful user interfaces matter so much — as well as things like polished documentation and accessible tutorials.