Our Pragmatic Processes
vaidyJanuary 29, 2010
One of the things we do is to create a culture of continuous improvement. To help ourselves stay on track and not lose sight of the forest for the trees, we do the following:
- We do our standups a little different. We talk about what we learned yesterday than what we got done. Credit for this idea goes to HashRocket
- Encourage our people to read awesome books [ Pragmatic Programmer and Getting Real are our current favourites] and then share what they read in our standups. It only takes 30min [or less] to read enough to share something useful in the next day’s standup.
- Encourage our people to be generalists rather than specialists. This approach has resulted in most of our people being polyglots.
- We’ve woven UX improvement into our sprints. This results in software that’s balanced both in terms of user interaction and functionality.
- Test Driven Development: We’re yet to get completely infected by this discipline. But we’re getting there.
- Not interrupting each other: It takes 15min for people to regain their “flow” if they get interrupted. And if this happens many times in a day, we end up with a stressed out team at the end of each long day. So we prefer patience to instant gratification. [Tip: Campfire is a great tool in this regard. We prefer this to IM].
We’ll be blogging about some of the above topics in more detail in the coming weeks. Do drop a line in the comments section below, if you’d like to learn more about anything specifically.