Teamwork & Culture

A well-known adage is 'diversity brings innovation.' Diversity can be in culture, thinking, discipline, gender, and many more aspects. The result is the same: the chances for creating innovation in a given context increase when diversity is involved. To some extent, this principle should also hold for gender diversity in software teams. Achieving gender diversity in IT-related fields has been a goal for decades, but still, too few women choose such a career. But what skills or traits assigned to the feminine role bring concrete advantages to software teams?

Continuous integration has been around for a while now, but the habits it suggests are far from common practice. Automated builds, a thorough test suite, and committing to the mainline branch every day sound simple at first, but they require a responsible team to implement and constant care. What starts with improved tooling can be a catalyst for long-lasting change in your company's shipping culture. Continuous integration is more than a set of practices, it's a mindset that has one thing in mind: increasing customer value.

Prominent technology companies including IBM, Microsoft, and Google have embraced an analytics-driven culture to help improve their decision making. Analytics aim to help practitioners answer questions critical to their projects, such as 'Are we on track to deliver the next release on schedule?' and 'Of the recent features added, which are the most prone to defects?' by providing fact-based views about projects. Analytic results are often quantitative in nature, presenting data as graphical dashboards with reports and charts.

Software development teams no longer live - or want to live - in a world of command and control. They want to be self-organizing and have adaptive, supportive, and collaborative leadership guiding them. This new age of management requires managers to build a culture of trust, encourage participation of their teams in decision making, and sponsor innovation. Simply put, managers need to do away with the traditional (micro) management and share power with self-organizing teams.

There comes a point of no return in the life of every successful software-intensive system, a point where you can no longer place a pile of your best developers at one end of a lever and expect them to move the world. Rather, you must come to realize that putting piles of developers at the end of even the longest lever is no longer the right tool to use. Crossing that point while still preserving the values and the tribal memory of your organization's development culture requires some serious adult supervision.

Three closing comments are in order. … practices that promote local knowledge movement (such as informal discussions with peers) make global knowledge management difficult. … a common error we've encountered is having different, unconnected KMSs in place. … trying to unify different cultures in global organizations (except under crisis-management circumstances) might not be the right approach.

The cultural environment at a government research center differs from the customer-centric business view. Consequently, eight of XP's 12 practices are seemingly incompatible with the existing research culture. … Despite initial awkwardness … XP can function in situations for which it appears to be ill suited.

The potential benefits of using models are significantly greater in software than in other engineering disciplines because of the potential for a seamless link between models and the systems they represent. Unfortunately, models have rarely produced anticipated benefits. The key lies in resolving pragmatic issues related to the artifacts and culture of the previous generation of software technologies.

[Global Software Development] requires close cooperation of individuals with different cultural backgrounds. Cultures differ on many critical dimensions, such as the need for structure, attitudes toward hierarchy, sense of time, and communication styles.

Although the organizations included in this section differ in continents and cultures, several common themes emerge from these reports. All organizations had quantifiable business targets and managed their pursuit of these targets empirically.

Discussions with users must be carefully planned … [I]dentifying ourselves and gaining their confidence was of utmost importance … Learning the work culture and adapting to it go a long way toward winning support.

Our culture has evolved such that owning up to risks is often confused with defeatism. Thus, a manager faced with a nearly impossible schedule may deliberately ignore risks to project a confident, 'can-do' attitude.

Working in and designing for other cultures can lead to communication breakdowns.

Reuse is not just a technical issue. Hewlett-Packard studied why people sometimes resist reuse and which organizational models appear to encourage reuse more than others. … successful reuse programs must be integrated within the culture of a company's existing organizational structure. One crucial organizational factor is the relationship between producers and consumers of reuse components and services.