4 ms·

The Most Effective Software Development Team

29 points by beekums 10y ago

popdoit 10y ago
Horrible description of UX designers as "...often judged solely on how the product looks". You're working with visual designers, not UX designers.
- arjie 10y ago
  "are often" not "should be".
  - thasaleni 10y ago
    "... often judged SOLELY..." This makes it sound like they can't be judged on anything else, still a very bad way to describe what UX designers do
    - arjie 10y ago
      It's not an important point because it doesn't affect the crux of his post but I feel the need to argue because you've clearly grossly misunderstood the meaning of a sentence that's easily understood by most. He's not saying they can't be or shouldn't be judged on anything else. He's saying that, in practice, the person they're reporting to judges their work solely based on how it looks. It doesn't matter whether or not this is true anyway. It's just a made up example to illustrate the idea.
      - popdoit 10y ago
        Shut up.
ujttpu 10y ago
I was reading the article in anticipation of how such teams could scale, unfortunately the article admitted they don't. We've tried a cross disciplinary team of 30+. The overhead of keeping everyone in sync removed most of the benefits. Another rather surprising problem was that by putting everyone in one room we had noise problems. Marketers and designers were far more extroverted, creating an overly loud environment for developers who wanted silence to code.
pjbster 10y ago
What also helped was the better communication that came with this team structure. Artists and developers weren’t seated across the hall or on different floors. The team sat together which meant that developers were seated right next to artists. Interesting. Seems to advocate for shared office space and interrupting co-workers (later in the same paragraph). The author clearly feels that there was a synergy there and doesn't presume to claim any wisdom as to why this was the case. So we're left to tease out our own conclusions: keep team sizes small, cross-functional and in shared office space.

29 points by beekums 10y ago

Horrible description of UX designers as "...often judged solely on how the product looks". You're working with visual designers, not UX designers.

arjie 10y ago
"are often" not "should be".
- thasaleni 10y ago
  "... often judged SOLELY..." This makes it sound like they can't be judged on anything else, still a very bad way to describe what UX designers do
  - arjie 10y ago
    It's not an important point because it doesn't affect the crux of his post but I feel the need to argue because you've clearly grossly misunderstood the meaning of a sentence that's easily understood by most. He's not saying they can't be or shouldn't be judged on anything else. He's saying that, in practice, the person they're reporting to judges their work solely based on how it looks. It doesn't matter whether or not this is true anyway. It's just a made up example to illustrate the idea.
    - popdoit 10y ago
      Shut up.

ujttpu 10y ago

I was reading the article in anticipation of how such teams could scale, unfortunately the article admitted they don't. We've tried a cross disciplinary team of 30+. The overhead of keeping everyone in sync removed most of the benefits. Another rather surprising problem was that by putting everyone in one room we had noise problems. Marketers and designers were far more extroverted, creating an overly loud environment for developers who wanted silence to code.

pjbster 10y ago

What also helped was the better communication that came with this team structure. Artists and developers weren’t seated across the hall or on different floors. The team sat together which meant that developers were seated right next to artists. Interesting. Seems to advocate for shared office space and interrupting co-workers (later in the same paragraph). The author clearly feels that there was a synergy there and doesn't presume to claim any wisdom as to why this was the case. So we're left to tease out our own conclusions: keep team sizes small, cross-functional and in shared office space.