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There are a lot of good solutions for audio and video conferencing, task, calender and document management. We got specs, uml diagrams, code generators, etc.
But still companies pour tons of cash so that people can be physically there even in the times of recession and i wonder why?
Nothing beat a face to face meeting. Period.
I work with a remote development team every day and I can only support other responders in saying that NOTHING beats working face-to-face. You need the subtle cues of body language, facial expression, and the ease of communication when you're physically present such as doodling on a whiteboard. Video conferencing is a close second but the organizational issues are difficult to overcome (meeting rooms, webcams, bandwidth...).
Communication through documentation works to some extent, but is often perceived as unnecessary overhead by developers who drank the Agile kool-aid. I try to use the phone, skype, MSN or e-mail as much as possible, but it works better with those people of the team that I've actually worked with in-person for at least a few days.
Distance isn't to much the problem, to be honest. You're either co-located or you're not.
We use a combination of Skype IM, Skype Voice, mobile phones and email to keep in touch. We haven't really got into webcams properly, but even then, there's something about face to face contact you can't really replicate with technology.
I think most companies see splitting up their workforce as a step-change. A company that started out with homeworkers is better able to find and establish an office to move them into than the other way round. Money is only one consideration - it really does change the way the team works, and if you get it wrong, you don't have a team, you have a bunch of solo developers who actually take longer to do things.
Of course, it's also easier to recruit and mentor new members of the team if there's an office for everyone to work in.
Many people do better face-to-face. Many people do just as well at a distance. However, people in management tend to more focused on interpersonal relations, which generally means they're face-to-face people. So, as a general rule, people in management tend to dislike or distrust meeting at a distance.
Furthermore, meetings are very often unproductive. This applies to meetings at a distance and face-to-face meetings. Indeed, it's significantly easier to get off-topic, unprofessional, and unproductive when meeting face to face. However, when an at-a-distance meeting is unproductive, it's almost always seen as such because it was at a distance. It can be exceptionally frustrating to deal with the technology and limitations of remote meetings, and it's infinitely easier to blame the situation and the technology for your lack of productivity.
To sum up: people are a problem.
I have a few cynical and contrary opinions on this, based on my experience working for a large Australian organisation with branches all over the country and my current remote work for a US company.
Cynically - face to face works so you can do deals off the record. This may not be as corrupt or as underhand as it sounds but an astounding amount of management-level decision making happens where people negotiate relative tradeoffs involving influence, favors accrued and owed and stuff which is hard or embarrassing to quantify. Even when an organisation has a commitment to using teleconferencing, groups emerge who negotiate off-camera and thus acquire a competitive advantage.
At the purely technical level, I think face-to-face is nowhere near as important as cited. The political issue is in drawing this distinction - if you label your stuff as non-political and safe to do via remote comms, you are explicitly labeling the other negotiations as somehow not safe. Another aspect is that people looking to move up to management need to become visible and a known player in the face-to-face discussions.
Developers, including myself, are notoriously poor at picking up the non-verbal cues cited above (just ask my wife!). In a relaxed atmosphere of trust, they can use emoticons and in-jokes explicitly in IM sessions without worrying about translating someone else's expression, especially across cultures.
IM sessions, with the ability to search the transcript, are far more efficient than verbal or video conversations, when discussing projects. If you don't pick up some nuance at the time someone says it, you can go back and examine the exact sentence in context.
I use video chat infrequently and the main use of voice chat is so I can talk to my boss in his spare time whilst he's driving. Those are good conversations to give me a general feel for how things are going but usually inadequate for technical.
Here's a podcast that talks about distributed software development: Managing Commercial Software Projects. Here's a blurb from the show page:
Andy Singleton is an entrepreneur who
has long studied and practiced the art
of distributed software development.
Influenced by the open source and
agile movements, he has arrived at
some startling conclusions about how
to manage commercial projects. Among
them: don't interview people, don't
estimate schedules, and don't spend
time in teleconferences. In this
conversation with host Jon Udell he
explains why not to do these things,
and what to do instead.
I thought it was pretty interesting.
Face to face meetings provide a lot of visual feedbacks which you do not get in other means. This is must if you want to discuss important subjects like architecture, reviews etc, which tend to be slow or useless if done over phone, email, twiki etc.
Typically status updates can be done via other means, we normally use Skype, Twiki, Email, Phone keep in sync.
I really like communication via IM, email or phone. It's totally ok and I really appreciate using it.
Now comes the big "but" (with a single 't'):
You are not able to "just walk over" your colleague and ask him** a short question. For sure, you can IM him or mail him. But it will take some times till he answers your question.
The other point is drinking coffee. You cannot just drink a cup of coffee with him and talk about your problems.
If you let your brain release your thoughts, problem will disappear. And that's one reason behind drinking coffee with colleagues.
I really need personal communication. I need it. About 70% of the communication can be replaced by IM or whatever, but the 30% are very important.
** him = him/her
Some 80% communication is non-verbal, video conferencing helps a bit, but is not good enough.
There have been studies done over success rate of business negotiation and project cooperation depending on type of communication used. It was ranging from 90% success face to face, to less then 10% with email and text only IM.
For example one of such studies, conducted by Harvard Business School professor Kathleen L. Valley yielded for example such results:
"among 24 four-person decision making
groups interacting via computer, there
were 102 instances of rude or
impulsive behavior. Another 24 groups
that interacted in person yielded only
12 remarks of that nature."
Related Wired article: "The Secret Cause of Flame Wars"
Related
It's most asked question in IT job interview so I want to know what should the way that I explain the answer of this type of question asked to me.
"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. But, No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man"
The simple meaning of new technology is to make work or effort simpler or make it easy.
Not just technology but everything that may changes you update yourself with it.
To keep updated with technology you need to use technology, specially latest enhanced technology.
The concept is: by doing so (using technology) it will become obligatory for you to keep track of any new or emerging technologies through reading, searching etc.
I am not claiming that this is something you should do. Its one of the way what you try to do to make yourself updated to some extend with the pace of technology change.
you should go and subscribe yourself to various RSS feeds, go frequently to some great sites (dzone, javalobby etc.) and look for blogs/articles which deserves a read.
Things which you don’t know in this case deserves more read and i start googling stuff to get more details.
see, technology products will not succeed if they are developed for their own sake, nor simply to help users complete a specific task. Technology products succeed when they are incorporated by users into their daily lives in ways that serve their fundamental needs as people - fundamental needs such as relating to others and keeping in touch, even when they are miles apart.
The truth is nobody fully understands knows how today’s technology might be used tomorrow. If the recent past is anything to go by it’s likely that people will certainly find innovative and as yet unthought-of ways to communicate and keep in touch.
Thanks,...!!!
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We are acting Scrum in our department now. But the up level management structure is traditional, such as Project Manager(PM), Development Manager(DM), Team Leader(TL) and Test team leader(TTL).
Team Leader act as a Scrum master, he controls all the things in our team: communicated with PM/DM/TTL, development management... Our PO's responsibility is just maintaining PBL.
Our managers and team member are accustomed to the traditional management type, they do not care Scrum, and they said some Scrum rules are hidebound.
I act as another SM, I want to change the current status.
But I haven't any headship, just is an ordinary developer in our department. Does anyone has this kind of bother too?
Thanks in advance!
I heard a lovely saying once and can't remember who said it. "They want Agile but they don't know what it is - so we give them Agile but we don't know what they want."
It sounds as if this is happening in your company. Someone, somewhere wants the team to use Scrum, but it's not the team.
That must be a difficult job for an SM, especially if you're doing it unofficially! There are some things I can suggest for you. First, learn some basic coaching techniques: positive language, GROW framework and giving and receiving feedback. This will give you some additional tools which are outside of Scrum and support someone in a leadership rather than a management position (even an unofficial SM can become a leader).
Then, don't worry about the actual practices. If someone has mandated Scrum then the team will be forced to do this anyway. Instead, concentrate on the values and principles of Scrum - particularly collaboration, communication and transparency. Help the team to work with each other instead of being silo'd away. You will have to be an example for them. Don't mandate pair programming, but do go over and pair. Don't mandate stand-ups, but do have conversations first thing in the morning and draw in as many people on the team as you can. Look at the principle of "Continuous Improvement". Learn how to do root cause analysis and the 5 Why's so that the team can understand better why things are hard and take action themselves.
I also recommend Mary Lynn Manns and Linda Rising "Fearless Change". This will help you to work out who else could help you.
Finally, I will echo #sjt. Don't commit Scrum suicide. However, if it's something you really want and your company aren't doing it in the right way, don't be afraid to look elsewhere. Learn some of the fundamentals, practice TDD on your own and find a new job.
Whatever you do, good luck! The first step to change is desire.
If you don't have buy in from your other developers its not going to work. Period.
Scrum requires a heap of discipline, especially during the early adoption phase.
I wouldn't be bothered that management don't care for it. If you're free to do the work of developing the software, and all they care about is results, then it shouldn't matter if you happen to have a 10 minute stand up each morning, and plan small chunks of the work into manageable bits, as long as you're hitting the targets they want you to hit.
If you're team isn't on board though, you're going to have a really hard time getting it working, and it will probably fail and cause more impact that not having tried at all.
If you can try to start it in a small project, with a few developers who are on board with the idea, then you can report back to the rest of your development team on how you found it works, what were the benefits and what were the negatives (reflecting is after all an important part of Scrum).
If you want to get your management on board, you might find that after doing a few projects this way you're much better at estimating the time it will take to develop the requirements you've been given by the PMs, hopefully being able to hit deadlines with more accuracy.
Remember, the PMs and BAs can still work in their normal way, once they've handed requirements to you, you're able to build them using Scrum. Its not ideal, but short of having the buy in of everyone, and the ability to speak directly to users and get them to help write user stories, it will be the best you've got.
When asked to estimate the time it will take to complete the project you can apply Scrum techniques. You can break the specifications down into smaller chunks, group them into sprints and develop them accordingly, hopefully yielding better results.
"I act as another SM, I want to change the current status"
Well, that's a good start right there, wanting to change the situation. Although I must say that without the management buy in, it will be tough. Try and arrange an experienced Scrum Speaker or Agile Coach come and do a presentation or workshop at your company which involves all the upper management. Once you have the management believing in Scrum, it will be all downhill from there.
"Team Leader act as a Scrum master, he controls all the things is our team"
This goes against the Self Organized and Self empowering Teams principle in Scrum. A good Scrum Master would empower the Team in a disciplined fashion within the Scrum Rules, to that appropriate level that, the Team should be able to run on it's own. One suggestion is that the Team Leads need to have a different mindset when working as a SM and different one while working as a Senior Developer, there are no Team Leads in a Scrum Team, only Scrum Team members. You cannot assign true leadership, that is a mutual role which can be earned by creating a reputation of helping others and mentoring others. Have them spit time between SM and development duties 30%, 70% or 50-50 or whatever you find appropriate. Command and control could be counter productive for the Team.
Our managers and team member are accustomed to the traditional management type, they do not care Scrum
A Scrum Trainer had told once told me, "Do not commit Scrum Suicide". If your managers do not care about Scrum, don't get fired trying to convince them. Whatever methodology you guys might follow or "not" follow, you have to realise that all this is a business. Your pay check is dependent on your boss's approval, if your boss or manager does not care about Scrum, then don;t do it. If they care about waterfall, Switch to it, do it like you care, but don't do Scrum halfway and call it scrum.
What has worked for me in the past is to identify and communicate pain-points. Certainly, you should never do something because Kent Beck told you to, especially something that will just get you fired. However, some smart people worked at figuring out a set of practices which is cohesive, and divergence from these practices almost always leads to pain points.
As just one example: if you do Scrum where you have a requirements iteration, a design iteration, an implementation iteration, and a testing iteration, this in theory could work but in practice never does. (When it does, it ends up being Waterfall, and the "iteration" notion becomes meaningless.) Pointing out to your boss that you learned something about the requirements while QA was testing might help him realize there's value in getting QA involved in requirements. Or finding risks in the software design by doing a small prototype may help to show why it might help to collapse the design iteration.
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I work with scrum about 2 months and don’t have all the experience I wish, so I would like to hear some inputs about it.
My concern is people never say about drawbacks for the two sides; company and workers.
I know the benefits of a cross-functional team but which are the drawbacks? What is hidden beside the amazing Eden Garden?
I'm confused because as a company benefits of replaceable people, for the team is good because the opportunity of having knowledge and share experience (besides all teamwork benefit).
Again, I know all the benefits but I want explore the drawbacks just because in the middle there are the ordinary people.
Normally these people dedicate heavily to gain knowledge. They buy books, courses, attending seminar and so on.
In every company when someone knows much more than everyone else, people and managers get desperate wishing or even demanding that these ordinary people share all their knowledge.
And that’s strange.. Because these are communism thoughts and we live in capitalism society and since I was born, everything was so competed and now people say about collaborative.
Can Scrum and Lean principles ruins (or making hard) the professionals' life?
Scrum and Lean, in and of themselves, cannot ruin anybody's life. Nor can they, alone, make your life.
The culture of your organization will always be a far more dominant factor than the particular product management or development management method in place. Scrum can be misused. Lean can indeed make workers feel replaceable and pressured to perform all day, all the time.
On the other hand, both tools (they are just tools) can be used to create high-performing teams where all members value each other and each others' contributions. Being on a team that delivers consistently good results at high velocity feels great.
You will also find every result in between. It depends much more on culture than process.
I believe that culture flows from the top. Therefore, look at how the company leaders treat each other, their subordinates, their vendors, and their customers. That will tell you much more about what your life will be like than which methodology the company follows.
I'm only going to address your comments about sharing knowledge reducing your own value. In an ideal team culture, knowledge itself isn't as valued as someone's ability to acquire new knowledge and solve problems they haven't seen before. When I think about the star engineers I have known, it's not because they know this or that, it's because it's obvious they could be on nearly any task, on nearly any team and they would both begin to solve the problem and raise the level of the entire team.
There are a few things I've seen from agile methodologies which I'd put against it when you're weighing it up.
From a developers perspective there are two things:
1) The short sprints often lead to short term decisions - which is as intended but can be frustrating for some developers. While delivering "just enough" is great for the project, asking a developer to do something that they know that they're going to have to very heavily refactor, if not rewrite, two sprints down the line can be demotivating.
2) Where you've got opinionated developers (and is there any other sort) I've seen conflict over prioritisation. Adding not only what should be done but how important it is and therefore when it should be done brings on a whole other level of disagreement. In theory the developers don't have a say here but hard delination never works.
From a management point of view they don't like the uncertainty. "When's it going to be ready?" "No idea, when we get to the point you say you're happy". Essentially for them it's a leap of faith - if they do it once then generally they're sold but getting them to do the first time is hard.
I will assume, that as one commentator suggested, you meant to ask: "What are the drawbacks of Scrum?"
I think that the biggest problem with Scrum is that it is easy to understand - but very difficult to implement properly. Scrum, like XP, like most methodologies is not built on individual atomic practices, each capable of improving an existing process.
Scrum requires a shift in the organizational mindset. It requires a shift from ego-centric to communal behavior. The entire organization should focus on bringing the most value, constantly, and do so over perceived self-interest.
For example, a cross-functional team member may be required to do things out of his comfort zone (the flip-side of being able to experiment with new interesting tasks), because it needs to be done by somebody.
Team Leaders and project managers need to relinquish authority when they are called to take on the role of servant-leaders, and when they are asked to stop telling team-members which tasks to pick, instead relying on the team to manage itself.
Stakeholders are forced to face the reality that they can't eat the cake, and have it whole, when they are forced to choose between having all of the scope they want or having it by the date they want it done (this is always true, but Scrum is really in-your-face about it).
Most of all, the drawback of Scrum, is its tendency to disillusion beginning practitioners. This comes from people expecting something from it that it can't deliver: A solution to their problems!
That's right! Scrum does not solve an organizations problems. It highlights them. It is up to the organization to step up to the bat and do something about them. Incidentally, this is done with what I consider to be the single most important ceremony of Scrum - The Retrospective! If you do nothing else in Scrum - do the retrospective:
Find out what you did well, and continue doing it.
Find out what you need to improve and do something to improve it.
Rinse and repeat!
In a presentation by Ken Schwaber to Google on Scrum, he once said that Scrum isn't necessarily good for the organization. It could tell you early on that your project is doomed to fail. If you avoid Scrum, you may have a few more months of ignorant bliss to prepare you for the day you lose your job. Funny, but true. Think on that.
Hope it helps,
Assaf.
I'm no expert in any particular methodology (Agile, Scrum, etc.) but I empathize with your feelings. One of the biggest issues I've seen is that a team that really isn't interested almost unanimously in the methodology will tend to have problems. A few outliers isn't a problem, but if 1/3 or more of the team isn't interested, it becomes a nightmare. Writing good software is important and a company should hire professionals that help them meet that goal, but if the team is forced to meet that objective without finding the experience rewarding the quality will soon drop off.
No, I don't think it will ruin your professional life, but it can be pretty miserable if a company is pig-headed and doesn't realize that they need an environment where their workers are finding rewarding work.
I'm not totally sure of the question because it was kind of hard to follow.
Basically... no? I fail to see how an agile principle could 'ruin a professionals' life'... if implemented incorrectly it could waste some of their time, meaning a small lack of experience gained. Other than that, if the methodology fits the business and is implemented correctly, then is is a powerful tool that is useful to everybody.
Any methodology only works if the people are competent.
Silly question imo.
I've certainly seen things packaged as Scrum and Lean make the development process more difficult. Usually the result of managers picking and choosing the aspects that support their purpose, without buying in to the underlying spirit. Any process can work if properly applied, and process can fail if applied poorly.
Cross-functionality isn't a means to make people replaceable. It's a means to solve flow bottleneck problems that decrease productivity.
Cross-functionality doesn't mean that everyone can do everyone else's job, it means that people are capable of assisting with the work step that come (immediately) before their work or (immediately) after their work.
A better term for this is "Local Generalization", or "Special Generalization". And again, the goal has nothing to do with making people more removable from the organization. Creating the kid of people who can use Local Generalization to their advantage costs a lot of money in teaching and guidance. Once an organization makes such an investment in a worker, they're even less motivated to remove them. And organizations tend to only make such investments in people that they already want to keep around.
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My organization has been experimenting with the introduction of more "Agile" methods. We've been trying the Scrum approach for a short while, and most of the team has, more or less, adapted to it. I like it as a whole, but I'm concerned about one potentially severe impact of the methodology: as teams are consistently focused on features and backlog items, and testers are more integrated with the overall development process, it seems like skill sets are becoming blurred, and people are sensing less respect for their individual abilities.
Some of our developers are excellent at server-side technologies and optimization of heavy-weight data provisioning. Others have invested a large amount of their careers learning GUI technologies and have developed a fundamental understanding of users and usability in an application. Neither skill set is better than the other, but they are certainly different.
Is this an inevitable result of the Scrum process? Since everyone on the team (as I understand it) contributes to satisfying the next feature/requirement, backlog item, or testing goal at hand, the underlying philosophy seems to be "anyone can do it." This is, in my experience, simply not true. Most engineers (developers, testers, etc.) have a particular skill set they have honed over the years, and the Scrum methodology, in my mind, tends to devalue those very abilities they were previously respected for.
Here's an example for clarification:
If a sudden change of technology occurs on the server-side data provisioning, and every item on the to-do list for the sprint is based on this new change, the GUI developers (who likely haven't had time to become acclimated with the new technology) might not be able to contribute to the sprint. At the very least, they will need to invest time to get ramped up, and then their code will be suspect because of their lack of experience.
I understand the need for rapid development to discourage "role silos" but doesn't this discount one fundamental reality: people develop skills in accordance to necessity, their interests, or their experiences. People seem to be less motivated when they perceive their position is one of "plug-ability" (e.g. we can "plug" anyone in to do this particular task). How does Scrum address this? If it doesn't, has anyone addressed this when adopting the Scrum methodology?
The short answer is an emphatic NO! Scrum does not blur or depreciate the skills required for specialization. Scrum does not promote generalization.
The long answer is that in Scrum, the most important thing is to get the work "Done". The team, as a team (as opposed to a collection of individual "stars") collaborate, as needed, in order to get the job done. Whatever it takes - however they want (Scrum is about self managing, self motivating teams, right?).
What this means is that a scrum team may be composed of several specialists, who primarily do what they specialized in (DBA, Graphic Design, even technical writers). The team, as a whole, should have all of the skills required to fulfill the requirements. This is not the same as saying that each team member has to have all of the skills aforementioned.
That being said, it is often desired - often by the members themselves - that members other than the specialists be at least adequate in skills different from their specialty. Another poster already mentioned Scott Ambler's "General Specialist". This helps the team when there's too much work of one kind, when the specialist is absent, and it helps the member when he really would like to gain experience outside his specialty.
Given that the team is self organizing, if for some reason a specialist finds himself in the middle of the sprint, without any work to do in his specialty, the best way to deal with it, is to simply ask the specialist what he wants to do. Let the team decide. The specialist can decide to help in his other areas of adequacy, do a POC for the next sprint, "shore-up" the defenses by fixing some long forgotten technical debt, or shine the shoes of the members who are working.
Yup. I don't know if this is the long answer. But it definitely was a long answer.
:-)
The point of Scrum is for the developers to self-organize. We use scrum where I am, and jobs get passively sorted by a person's focus. We don't do it on purpose with a chart and list, it just happens. We all know who's best at what, or what their main/secondary focuses are. If the 'main' person needs help, they get the person/people with a secondary focus in it to help. We do get plenty of tasks not necessarily in line with whatever our particular focus is, but you always know who to ask for help then.
For your example - I don't know that if you say had 3 server guys and 5 gui guys, that you'd expect to get all the work done in that sprint (if the server guys + some help from the others wasn't enough). The way the sprint is supposed to work is that from a prioritized list, the developers pick what they think they can get done in that 30-day timeframe. If that meant the GUI guys needed 2 days of server-side training in order to help, that's what it'd mean. Unless there were concurrent things also high up the list that they could do instead. The sprint tasks are not supposed to be dictated by management as a psuedo-deadline.
If you have a Safari account, there's an interesting mostly case-study book by one of the guy/s who invented scrum.
I've been working as a ScrumMaster for about 18 months and have worked with two different teams. I initially expected to experience the potential issues you raise but this has not been the case. What I generally observe is that the team evolves into a mixture of specialists and generalists as people find the appropriate role for themselves - one that they can enjoy and be successful at. This is self-organisation at work. I have never had a case where our specialists were sitting idle.
If this did occur, I would expect it to be raised as an issue in Sprint Retrospective and the team would discuss how to improve the situation. The most obvious (and brutal) conclusion would be to change the team composition.
I am not sure why skill set will get blurred. There is a fair amount of confusion in the agile world. Scrum is a project management process and not a software development process and should not be seen as one. The engineers have to follow their own methodologies like TDD or extreme programming to add their own part to being agile.
Nothing goes away in scrum.
PM's still document as they go
Architects still architect their components. The only thing is they just delay some major decisions to more responsible point in time.
Developers should still follow best practices such as SOLID principles to enable for refactoring in a consistent manner as features change.
I think Scott Ambler addresses this issue very thoroughly in http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/generalizingSpecialists.htm...
His concept of a Generalizing Specialist is exactly the thing Collective Ownership / Scrum Team calls for, and makes total sense to me.
Its hard to achieve in real life though ;-)
If you find for any reason ('sudden change of technology' or not) that the amount of work required for a system over a sprint is greater than the amount available then there's a problem with your scheduling.
One fix is that, as you suggest, you take programmers from other areas and throw them onto the mix. How well this works depends on the skills of that person and how different the problem domain is, but treating programmers as generic units that can be farmed out as needed is generally not a successful strategy for developing software.
This is still a scheduling problem though.
The best thing about Scrum is exactly the fact that skills do get a bit blurred! The point is to avoid silos at all costs by spreading specialist knowledge across the team and letting people work a bit outside their comfort zone.
Obviously this is not for everybody. Some developers are happy in their own narrow specialist field and such people are more of a hindrance in a Scrum process than an asset, whereas well-rounded and multi-talented people who are determined to get the job done, usually adapt very very well to it and are far more productive.
One of the key benefits of Scrum is to get the whole team actually involved and invested into the project instead of tackling their own special tasks and then riding off to the horizon. I'd claim that for most people, this is a far more rewarding way of working than the conveyor belt -approach of waterfall processes.
So I'd advise to boldly embrace the mixing of skills and having people come together to take down nasty problems instead of relying on specialist silos. The result of teams consisting of motivated people can be surprising.
Sounds like this would lead to more well-rounded developers, and also allow those who are experts in certain areas to continue to contribute their expertise.
I haven't used Scrum much myself (yet), but from your description, these types of teams would lead to a team/organization that is also more well-rounded as a whole - and shouldn't that be the goal of any team?
Handling sudden changes is part of Agile and this may mean that some people have to go off and learn new skills. Course this is more within the general Agile philosophy than anything Scrum-specific. There may be some extreme cases where the customer or business decides to change the world by bringing in something new and thus has to handle the subsequent pain of those people ramping up but if this is what they want and the developers are overruled, then there are only a couple of choices: (Take your lumps and try to handle the major changes) or (quit and get out of there).
While there can be some cases where someone that has specialized in something may be able to do things faster, this doesn't necessarily mean much if that is just one person on the team that is an expert and there is enough work in that area for 10 people for the whole sprint. Should those not an expert simply not do that work and let that one person attempt to get through as much as he or she can? I don't think so but there should be something to be said for those that aren't the best at something still trying to get done what they can get done.
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Yesterday I had a team leader of another team say that they took a while to figure out something I wrote on a wiki page because I referred to obtaining code from source control as "checking out" which apparently confused them. They said that they were use to Clear Case and had only heard of the term "joining a project" and said that they haven't really programmed much for a long time.
While this is fine, what it then made me think of is the different types of team leaders I've had over the years. I've had some that have been almost purely managerial and I've had those that are programmers that do managerial things at the same time.
Do people have a preference as to what kind of team leader they have? How do you care if your team lead is active in the development of your product? I find team leaders who actually sit and code like the rest of the team more likely to understand things like (from my experience):
things aren't always as simple as they sound. Team leaders I've had who don't code or rarely code at all believe everything is a piece of cake and shouldn't take much time at all (which perhaps might be the case if you want to hack it together)
they are more understanding that developers don't always like sitting in long meetings and do their best to avoid getting their team into as many pointless meetings as possible
they understand what you say from a technical point of view. Those that might not have coded for a while might not be up to speed with a lot of the new technologies, techniques or lingo
I find it much more satisfying to have a team leader who has the mind of a developer and likes to get their hands dirty in the code as well. Perhaps there are some people out there that like team leads who distance themselves from the actual coding side of things and simply doles out the work, or perhaps another type of team leader that I haven't mentioned?
A team leader has to be a coder -- they can't lead the team unless the team respects them and where they're taking everyone.
A team manager, on the other hand, can either be a coder or someone who is just well organised and knows when to ask questions and interface to other management.
It is possible to find both a manager and a leader in the same person, but more often the roles (should be) separate and distinct.
You should read the book Managing Humans. I am of the opinion managers should keep their hands out of the code. They have more important responsibilities like keeping people away from developers, so they can do their job. Having them jump into development creates confusion as they aren't in it enough to know what's going on and have their time divided between that and other things, so it is difficult to count on them for major pieces of functionality. Plus, it really sucks when you have to tell your manager that something they just wrote needs to be changed, and you have to go back and redo it. Managers are really their to jump on the grenades for the rest of the team, so they can focus on accomplishing the task at hand.
That being said, should manager's know about software engineering? Yes of course they should, that's the field they are in. Should be know how to code in the latest and greatest whiz bang technology? That shouldn't really matter as long as they get how software development works.
I have no preference, I can't, I have to work with all of them, even though too many cooks spoil the broth. On a multi-developer typical project I have a technical lead, project manager and a non-technical customer. Of course, divisional and programme management will each stick their head in.
There are a number of types of leader, each have their own traits:
Non-technical customer: "The customer is always right." Often wants a moon-on-a-stick. Will call both the management and the technical bods and take the best answer as gospel.
Team manager/line manager: Somewhat pastoral role. Not particularly interested in the project I'm working on right now. Steps in when there is a decision to be made between project priorities. Probably really wants to be a coder, and delegates all the rest of his work that he can to his subordinates.
Project manager: Varying degrees of technical know-how. Is concerned only with timescales and costs. Does not understand, "I don't know how long its going to take, I need to play with it for a couple of days first to get a feel."
Team leader/technical lead: Just another developer, but with more experience. Responsible for technical decision making that will affect the whole project. Often fighting with the project manager to carry out good engineering practice, even though it will take longer in the short term.
Team leader/glorified secretary: Someone who is supposed to lead the team, but acts as more of a secretary. (Usually a grade above the team). Answers the phones, insulates customers from the technical bods. This works fine until they ask a technical question, where the glorified secretary tries to blag his/her way out of it, and eventually they work around the secretary and talk direct to the team.
We typically have a PM (non technical) who manages the project from an admin. viewpoint and a Tech Lead who manages the technical aspects and provides technical leadership to the team.
The Tech Lead will code parts of the project and will probably be the main (only) developer for the "Proof of Concept" stage.
On some smaller projects, they are the same person but it's a rare combination.
The absolute worst Software Leads/Chief Software Engineers that I've worked with were the ones that wanted to be intimately involved in the technical details. Too many important tasks were either missed or just not done. Managing a team is a full-time job. If the lead wants to get involved in the technical aspects it will certainly come at the expense of the managerial aspects.
I’ve only had 2 Software Leads/Chief Software Engineers out of dozens that I thought were worthwhile. While both were previously software engineers, those days were long gone for both of them. They knew it. They didn’t even try to pretend. Their job was now to manage. Their job was to make sure the developers had every chance to succeed. They did their best to remove all obstacles and make sure everyone was making progress.
I have a theory, but have never seen it in action, that the best software lead would be someone who is not, nor ever has been a software developer. They specialize in the true spirit of management, specifically that of being a facilitator. Unfortunately, most managers are more politically motivated or are just in the job because they've reached their pinnacle technically.