5 Tips on How to work in a huge team

Okay, so our company is very successful, we have lots of clients, and we have a very strict dead-line to deliver. the next thing that happened – our team grew to something like 20 programmers!! and all sitting in the same huge open space.

So there are plenty of people to write code, but there are lots of unfortunate side effects: 

• first of all – lots of stuff to do, lots of people to do it, however – things falls between the chairs, things get done twice, the code is duplicated, and so on
• there is lack of coordination between all the programmers.
• a lot of code is written and therefore – build is breaking.
• noise in the room.
• tons of questions to the experienced programmers.
• and more…

So after a lot of talks in the team we made some adjustments to our daily work so we could actually get some work done, so thanks to my team I selected 5 tips that I think will help a huge team get something done:

1. split the team – we took the team leader and added 3 more lower level managers, so each of them has 5 programmers, and each connects between the team-leader and his team. we also made sure that in each team there will be at least one experienced programmer.
2. rearrange the workspace – first of all, make sure each and every one has his privacy, it’s very important, you can do so by adding something that physically separates between the work stations. you should also arrange the workstations by the teams, so the team meeting won’t interrupt each other’s.
3. continuous integration – The best way to make sure nobody breaks the build, we use TeamCity but every other tool will do just fine.
4. Make Morning standup meetings – We use agile as our development methodology, but even if you don’t, make morning meetings – a separate meeting for each team for 10 minutes so you would understand what you accomplished yesterday and will be done today. after this we make a meeting between all the leaders and the Team leader, that is how we make sure we are coordinated.
5. Get to know all the team-mates of the team – I believe it’s very important to know all the programmers in the big team personally, so there won’t be a situation when someone don’t want to approach you because he is shy and is embarrassed to talk to you! you want people to talk to each other between the teams, that’s how things gets done best.

So that’s it, that’s what I learned by working in a huge team, I hope you could use these insights for your team.

Health!!