Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Collaboration in a Dev Shop

These two good postings (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDevelopers.html and http://recycledknowledge.blogspot.com/2005/06/flow-stuckness-and-interruptions.html) lead us to muse what works better for us at SecondSpace.com.

Giving offices to developers is not the right answer. I saw for year at Microsoft how it lead to lack of collaborative work. But, the problem of sitting in a cube is that you get interrupted all the time and may not be productive either. So, need some nice bridge the two opposite camps. Jake @ secondspace.com had this to add:

At All Star Directories, we had a lot of flow etiquette in place to make sure we weren’t interrupting unless it was urgent

  • Schedule collaboration time, even if it’s 15 minutes. Easier to plan your day that way.
  • Try not to interrupt someone because you didn’t get your work done and you now are in fire-extinguisher-mode.
  • If you need to talk to someone in person, ping them on Messenger first and ask if it’s okay.
  • Emails are better information repositories than conversations.
  • Have a signal that you really need to work and can’t afford unnecessary interruptions. We would put up a post-it requesting people email or IM us.

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