I spent 10 years "coaching" (that word... blech...) teams, and from my experience there's no easy answers. What works for one team at one point in time might be

I spent 10 years "coaching" (that word... blech...) teams, and from my experience there's no easy answers. What works for one team at one point in time might be horrible for other groups. Having said that, here are some things that have worked for me: * If some of the people on the team have more skills than others, you could try asking people to pair program for part of the day. You could try setting up a lab space for this if people are interested. * Weekly brown bag sessions where you talk about a technical topic of interest. Let people on the team nominate ideas. Do it over lunch and have the company have food delivered. The better the food, the more people will want to attend. * You should get an automated build in place, and encourage people to do some level of automated testing if they aren't already. Some people take this a step further and use the automated tests to help drive out the design (Test-Driven Development by Kent Beck is a good book on this topic). * You could try starting a technical book club where people read a chapter a week, and then get together and discuss it over lunch. Given your situation, I'd strongly recommend starting with "The Practice of Programming" by Kernighan and Pike. Again, it helps a lot to have the company get good food delivered. Don't make a million changes at once. I might start with the book club if I were in your position. None of this stuff will magically transform your team, but these kinds of things can start creating a culture where people start to care more about the quality of their work. You'll encounter people who have very strong religious feelings for or against any one of the things I listed above, usually based on some past experience. I've seen each of the above succeed big and fail hard with different groups. Just try what seems to make the most sense for your team. One last note: when you try things, don't do stuff in fits and starts - talk with the team about what you're going to do, see if there's buy in, and if there is, commit to trying it for, say, four weeks. After the four week period is done, talk with the team about whether or not it's working for them, and if they'd like to stop or continue. Over time, you can add/remove/change more things in the same manner. Good luck!