Thoughts from a Thirsty Bear

What makes a high performing team tick? What is it that takes a team from being medium or low performing into elite performance as defined by DORA? On demand deployments, single figure bug counts, next to no downtime. Having worked in high performing teams, as well as having built a few myself over the years, I feel that I have a unique perspective on what it is that allows a team to work effectively together. The "Secret Sauce". So what's the recipe?  It's...." complicated ". But it looks a bit like this: At the top, unsurprisingly there is Technical Excellence . Team members need to be fully aware of and skilled in the various accepted best-of-breed tools and techniques that are out there. These currently include TDD, BDD, incremental design & architecture, refactoring, pairing/mobbing and so on. No excuses, these are all proven techniques that improve both quality and delivery, and should not be dropped unless there is a provable reason to. Even then ...

Do you know where your team's time goes? What are the competing priorities? Understanding this can be the first step to making sense of how a team is working together at a given time, and gives fairly heavy hints how to improve things for the better. A team's investment (time, money etc) can be broadly split into four 'pots': External Demand . User-facing features, new functionality. Internal Demand . Improvement. Kaizen. Failure Demand . This is the surprises. Often nasty, time consuming surprises. Business As Usual (BAU) . Keeping lights on. Those essential maintenance tasks that keep things ticking over. Any team that understands this, and knows how interdependent they are will generally thrive. Wait... interdependent?   Yes indeed. This is a zero sum game, and any team needs to make a conscious decision of how much of their finite budget (people, time, money) to invest in each at any given time. To make things even more interesting, a team only has direct control o...

 We are certainly living in interesting times right now. Specifically here I am talking about the rise of "Artificial Intelligence" (or, more correctly, 'Large Language Models", AKA 'LLMs') in software development. Whether you believe these tools are useful, or will lead to the demise of the human race¹, there is no doubt they are surrounded by the biggest hype cycle that anyone has seen before. There is an unprecedented (many are now saying unsustainable) amount of investment happening in this area. But any investment requires a return which means marketing and sales are working overtime to bring in new paying customers. Unfortunately as a result of these intensive sales campaigns there are companies - many of whom should know better - becoming ensnared in the unfulfilled promises being made by unscrupulous companies, and are " drinking the Kool Aid ". However, once the contracts are agreed by senior management, and the (not insignificant) bills be...