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The granularity of choosing what to work on also has to be the granularity of ownership. If individuals choose what to work on, then individuals have to be res
by twic 7y ago
The granularity of choosing what to work on also has to be the granularity of ownership.
If individuals choose what to work on, then individuals have to be responsible for owning the things they've built. Doing support, doing maintenance, being accountable for problems. If you let people cherry-pick the fun bits and then leave the crap to someone else, then you're doomed, as you say.
I work on a team like this. It's pretty weird, having come from classical XP teams where the team as a whole makes decisions and owns the code collectively. I don't think it's better. But it does work.
- Tade0 7y agoYeah, there are some perverse incentives in both of these approaches. We had a classic "glasses salesman" story going on here. The story goes like this: there was a store that sold prescription glasses which had a few salespeople. One was consistently better than all the others, so management took note and wanted him to teach the others. Turns out that what he did was to observe people coming to the store and only approach those who looked rich, going as far as distracting the other salespeople so that they wouldn't get a chance.