Debugging Teams: Better Productivity through Collaboration

by Brian W. Fitzpatrick

The Genius Myth is the tendency that we as humans have to ascribe the success of a team to a single person/leader.

Bus factor (noun): the number of people that need to get hit by a bus before your project is completely doomed.

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).

Let’s start with the most dreaded meeting of all: the standing meeting.

absolutely be kept to basic announcements and introductions

going around the room for a status update from every attendee (whether they have something important to add or not) is a recipe for wasted time, rolling eyes, and a burning desire to...

Schedule time on your calendar in three- to four-hour blocks and label these blocks as “busy” or even “make time,” and get your work done.

Try to schedule the meeting near other interrupt points in your day (e.g., lunch, end of day).

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

you need to provide team members with a combination of motivation and direction to make them happy

and productive.

There are two types of motivation: extrinsic, which originates from outside forces (such as monetary compensation), and

intrinsic, which comes from within.

Dan claims you can increase intrinsic motivation by giving people three things: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.15

Have a visible mission statement, to keep you focused on both your goals and nongoals.

Establish proper etiquette around email discussions. Keep archives, get newcomers to read them, and prevent filibustering by noisy minorities.

Document all history: not just code history, but also design decisions, important bug ...

What’s specifically at risk is your team’s attention and focus. Attention and focus are the scarcest resources you have. The bigger the team, the more capacity the team has to focus on building things and solving interesting problems —

Lack of Respect for Other People’s Time

Rather than spending a few minutes of their own time reading fundamental project documentation, mission statements, FAQs, or the latest email discussion threads, they repeatedly distract the entire team with questions about things they could easily figure out on their own.

The point here isn’t about who is right or wrong, but whether a disagreement is guaranteed to come to a conclusion and whether it’s worthwhile to keep a debate going. Never stop asking yourself those sorts of questions; at some point

you need to decide when it’s time to cut your losses and move on.

Redirect the Energy of Perfectionists Once a good-enough solution is found for the original problem, point the perfectionist to a different problem that still needs attention.

not let “the perfect be the enemy of the good,”

This trick of redirecting energy also works on the overly entitled people who spend more time complaining and criticizing than helping out.

Remember that your job is to build great things, not to appease every visitor or repeatedly justify your existence. The stronger your emotions are, the more likely you are to waste hours or days writing passionate replies to someone who doesn’t deserve such attention.

If someone is complaining, listen carefully. Always start by giving the person the benefit of the doubt, despite the angry or rude language.

Despite the short-term loss of your team’s attention and focus, do you truly believe the project will still benefit in the long run?

Do you believe the conflict will ultimately resolve itself in a useful way?

A strong culture based on HRT is irreplaceable, while technical contributions are definitely replaceable.

genius is such a commodity these days that it’s not acceptable to be an eccentric anymore.

it’s not worth compromising your culture for the short-term gains — particularly if it’s about a brilliant contributor who doesn’t acknowledge the importance of HRT.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

This kind of proactive, responsibility-seeking behavior reduces your manager’s workload because she has one less thing to worry about, and it shows that you’re capable of doing work beyond your current

level.

you are responsible for teaching people how to act and how to treat you.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Fear of failure is one of the most common traits of bad managers.

there is little opportunity for you to inject your own ideas into your product and you’ll usually wind up implementing (by rote) the product someone else designed.2

By hoarding information and requiring that they be a conduit for information and communication, bad managers are also able to take credit for your successes3 and blame you for your failures (and sometimes, their failures as well).

who is willing to sacrifice the health and sanity of the employees to meet the needs of the business.

Typically you’ll see this directly in the form of unrealistic deadlines and lack of qualified technical people to get projects completed on time. You may have difficulty acquiring enough hardware to effectively run your product, or find your team spending weeks rewriting something when a hardware purchase costing only a few hundred dollars would have done the job. This is unfortunately typical of a company that doesn’t value engineers and treats them like “work

units” or “resources,” giving them no voice in how the...

Lastly, your company might lack important things like focus, vision, or direction. This is often the result of too many masters, or “design by committee,” which results in conflicting orders being sent down to the rank and file.

If you focus on the way things should be in your organization, you’ll usually find nothing but frustration and disappointment.

Instead, acknowledge the way things are, and focus on navigating your organization’s structure to find the mechanisms you can use to get things done and to carve out a happy place for yourself in your company.

“It’s Easier to Ask for Forgiveness Than Permission”

If you spend all your capital winning a bunch of battles that just don’t matter, you’re going to find that you have nothing left in your account when it comes to the important things.

If You Can’t Take the Path, Make the Path