Building A Great DevelopmentTeam

Found this interesting yet understated piece in the transcripts of Boyd Multerer's video on Building a Great Development Team
Channel9 Wiki: BuildingAGreatDevelopmentTeam: "BM: I have some ideas about how to go about building an effective development team.

When you look at the releationship between developers on a team and also between your development team and your test team there are certain personalities that really stand out, and the thing to remember is that people on the team are people and they have to communicate with each other and they suffer all the normal problems that people have when they are communicating.

So, when I think of building my team. It starts by reminding my of an old guitar player joke:

- What do you call a guy who hangs out with three musicians?

- The drummer.

So, the guitar players are looking down on the drummer and they are thinking 'this guy is not a real musician, we're musicians'. But if you didn't have the drummer in the band you totally lose the beat and they would be all over the place and it would be a mess. If the band was all drummers, they would have a great beat but it wouldn't be very musical.

You need to have all the elements, all the musicians, in the band in order for it to be cohesive, have a good groove and make some really good music and a development team is the same way. You need to have the guy who is really good at double checking his work, really good at double checking everyone elses work and really good at doing schedules. You need to have the guy who is really good at 'Gee this is a really vague and ambiguous problem, we don't have a clear answer and there are competing interests in it' and he's able to listen to the various sides of the story and he's able to come up with some good directional answers. But maybe that's not the person who's going to spit and polish the schedule and make sure you're going to deliver on time. You need to have the person who goes really deep, the engineer who you give a specific really hard problem to. You know they don't care about all the other stuff tha"
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