In past one year what we best did was invest on our team. We focused on nurturing them and crafting our culture. It has yet to pay off however we have seen a great sign of high moral, involvement and spirit.
One of the core principles is continuous learning and collective leaning. The development team works 5 days a week. We want to make sure that we can do that for the entire company. That means Friday is not off but that’s the day to learn.
Abraham Lincoln once said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
We all learn together using mob programming and Friday wisdom. Everyone gets into a zoom call and learn together. We had some major breakthroughs like improving the performance of our web app by 50%, Changing the User experience by more cleaner design, Resolving merge conflict and fixing tests on Continuous Integration Servers.
We also have many bad sessions. It gets lost in figuring out what to work on. Sometimes you only work to setup the test data to work up. Some time explaining it concepts to the team members. Belive it or not but this is the important part of the learning experience. It makes you think whats going on and how can we get better next time.
We had one such episode yesterday. We thought we had to call one piece of code and our popup question type will take care of the business rules. But we were struggling and trying trial and error. Failing each time. Using our best guess and non worked. It was frustrating and disappointment. We were struggling and that too bad.
It made me think how could we have done it differently and I got a solution. Will the solution work? I don’t know but Is the solution a good strategy for similar challenges?
Vikram Shetty 