My vision of a good software developing team

We need to do things in the right way. In Chinese, “way” means “TAO”. If we follow the TAO of the software development, then we can deliver the great product in a short time.

Following are my vision for a good software developing team, and what the TAO should be:

- Follow good design
We need follow good OO design principles, and good design patterns. A good design is a foundation of a software product, and a good design is the DNA of a good product.

- Build Quality in
We need to balance between long-term benefits with short term benefits
Our software should be: flexibility, maintainability, and readability.

- Write clean code, constantly keep refactoring, continuously improving design
I like Uncle Bob’s saying” If code is messy, so does the product”.
Bad code slows down the productivity
Only one way to go fast is going well, writing clean code.

- Design for maintenance
The only way to develop maintainable code is to design the maintainability at design phase

- Deliver DRY project
DRY means “Don’t Repeat Yourself”.
Here I would like to mention the definition of what does mean a project is Done:
1. Deliver the product to our customer
2. Developers improve their skills;
3. Team gain knowledge;
4. The design and code is easier for future project
I think all these 4 things together means a project is done, but currently we only focus on No. 1, which cause on the problem in future: since the code is not reusable, we have to rebuild the entire app, or we have to duplicate all the old code, which either by fixing duplicating bugs or by spending long time to fix the issues by adding new codes. Finally we spend more time and money by reinventing the wheels.

- Test Driven Development
We need are not only use JUnit, but also to make sure our design is easier for unit test, our framework is easier to using unit test.

- Build automation
Our build automation should support everywhere, server side code, client side code, and test code.
Everything we need should be checked in the repository, including dependent libraries, config files, property files, database script, build tools, etc.

- Use static analysis tools
Currently there a lots of open source static analysis tools. For example they can find the potential bugs; tell you how complex of your code, how messy your code is, and tell you the coverage of your test code, etc. which will help us improving our code quality greatly

- Foster knowledge sharing and internal training
We need to build an environment which can foster knowledge management in our company, which is called ‘ba’ in “Lean technology”. We need to use Wiki, internal forum, internal training to share the knowledge for all the developers.
Knowledge management is very important

- Following the Agile
We need not only do the agile practices, but need also fully understand the agile principles and its values.
And each team needs to use different agile methods.
Developer needs to follow XP;
Manager team needs to follow Scrum
The whole company needs to follow Lean technology

- Training developer to be professionalism
We need our developers have the concept of:
Professionalism, craftsmanship, discipline, ethics, etc.

Next I want to discuss more about the gap between the manager and developer. I think there is a role we are missing – “coach”. I think a good coach will be a bridge connecting developers and managers, his role is filling the gap.
I would like to make a metaphor: thinking our software team as a sports team- whether basketball team or a hokey team. In a sports team a coach plays a very important role:
- Design the wining strategy for the team
- Instruct each player not only what to do but also how to do;
- start timeout when he found the issue during the game, either by substituting a new player or set up a new strategy;
- Training players and improve their skills;
- Motivate players and find their potentials;



So my suggestion is we need a coach or several coaches in our development team.