People around here tend to look down on "Agile" practices, but having a dedicated time for honest retrospectives on a schedule (rather than when things break) e

People around here tend to look down on "Agile" practices, but having a dedicated time for honest retrospectives on a schedule (rather than when things break) eases situation. If you can get the team together (physically or otherwise) on a regular basis to evaluate how things are going, pride and nerves tend to fall away. In general, I try to stick to very solid, objective things which could have been done better. If there was a missed opportunity to leverage existing functionality or libraries, mention this. If a decision was made by a developer with negative consequences, identify how that decision was reached. Often, it was due to a lack of collaboration with other developers and/or a set of assumptions which were incorrect. There are bad developers, but often there are bad processes which allow bad developers to make situations worse. If I were a developer, and every retrospective involved me explaining why my code blew up or project ran late, eventually there'd be an epiphany. Or I'd get frustrated and leave, which may be for the best as well. Even "good" devs make mistakes. Part of getting good is having made a few mistakes, and either identifying them yourself, or having a caring (senior) dev point them out and guide you. Some folks are capable of course-correcting and improving, and others are not. It could be that they're a lousy coder, but handle support or QA or some other tangential role with ease. Regardless, you have to deal with the situation, or the whole team will start to lose motivation. This will become a thorn in the side. The more experienced and capable devs will tire of having their work corrupted. Their quality will decline and they'll leave. Morale will take a huge hit over one person on a team. Better to make a decision about a person earlier rather than later. Nobody regrets letting someone go too quickly. Everybody regrets letting someone go too late.