Self-selected teams
I was reading Jeremy’s blog entry on GettingOutOfYourTeamsWay and it reminded me of something that struck us on InkBlot.
We were a self-selected team. Rather than the normal pattern of choosing a set of developers and throwing them together onto a project, we started with an already successful but idle pair and then others begged to join the team, until we hit the sweet spot of 6 developers.
This meant that we didn’t have to convince people of the approach, rather we chose the approach. It was very agile, and very successful. We chose our process and (surprise) it worked.
There were some things we didn’t do because we didn’t need to. For example we had no daily standups, because there was no need — our conversation was ongoing, and there was nothing to gain from repeating ourselves.
There is also a subtle difference between accepting resposibility and taking responsibility. We didn’t allocate cards by writing names on them (accepting resposibility). Rather we stuck them all on the board and took a new one whenever we finished the current card (taking responsibility). The funny thing was even the boring and difficult cards did get done.
I guess because the team took collective responsibility (by sticking them on the board) we felt that the honour of the team was on the hook if a card was ignored. And because (being self-selected) we cared for the honour of the team, we did the hard cards.
I liked it. Its a good way to work.
September 15th, 2003 at 1:58 am
This has been in my experience how a lot of open-source projects work: coders are self-selected and the honor system keeps things on track, even boring or housekeeping tasks. However, most such projects I’ve been in did lack the advantage of colocation: most everyone worked on them part time from home in different cities.