Some thought on building a dev team

(Only fit for small project)

1. Keep the team small with only core members.

Just to get enough resource into my team, we don’t need to care much whether this person is strong or not. That’s another opposite opinion against me. In my mind, if we can’t find a strong person, just let the position be empty. A just-so-so programmer may bring 35% productivity of other people, but compare to the salary we pay him, the resource we use to communicate with him, fix the bugs he makes and answer his questions. I don’t think it’s worthy. So repeat here: if no strong people available, then no hire.

 

2. Knowledge sharing.

A stable team will be affected little by employee’s leave. If there is no knowledge missed for someone’s leave, we get it. That’s the reason why Pair. Change your partner weekly will make the knowledge of anybody share with each others. If every member in your team equals to 75% of Bean, will you like this kind of team? If you arrange 100% to A, 100% to B, then try to arrange 150% to the pair of A and B. And check the productivity and development quality.

 

3. No key person.

Many people have this kind of thought: have one or two key person in my team, so that I can just focus on saving the key person, don’t need to care other ones much. But in my mind, we can’t save any person. So, please don’t have key person in your team. If there have to be, everyone should be the key person. If there is one person who is much stronger in your team, then please take care more of the weaker ones.