anthony galvin

It often starts with a sigh. Away from work you hear the obvious sound of frustration when an app or service doesn’t work as expected or crashes at a critical moment. As more and more of our lives are mediated through different glass rectangles, the expectations and importance of delivering brilliant, scalable and reliable experiences on those devices grows.

Which means in practice that the numbers of people involved in creating and engineering the apps and services that people rely on are inevitably large. One of the challenges for people like myself responsible for delivering the software to make all this happen is that with so many people involved how do you create an environment that delivers high quality software and services.

It’s a bit of a management speak truism that everyone on a project is “on the same team”, but in practice that’s not really possible. For some of the global projects I’m working on at Huge, there’s often over 100 folks involved, with a large percentage of these made up of engineers in variety of locations. We have a common objective but in practice we are many teams.

Where location does play a factor is often around balancing time zone coverage so that there’s enough people in each location to ensure effective collaboration. There’s no point adding a single developer with almost no time overlap with anyone else on the project.

However, in practice the amount of overlap doesn’t always have the positive effect people might think. Complex engineering problems require deep focus and an environment that reduces interruption in addition to cross discipline collaboration. The reality of a distributed team is that at some point of the day there are times when there’s fewer people online. Which correlates with fewer interruptions.

Would I choose to have the engineering teams scattered across the planet if it was possible to have everyone in one building. Probably not, but the reality of the work is that this isn’t really possibly, and in practice it’s not the most important piece of the puzzle.

#work #teams #agile #remote #software

10/11/2018 permalink