Toots from 2023-01-31#
[Team]Work as done: 1993 edition. “These observations, however, are less surprising if we ackn…#
[Team]Work as done: 1993 edition.
“These observations, however, are less surprising if we acknowledge the criticality of knowledge acquisition, sharing, and integration activities. Adopting a knowledge perspective leads to some specific recommendations for managers of software design efforts.”
Mastodon Source 🐘#
“In the software design team we studied, there was some relevant technical knowledge but little application domain knowledge, and customers were unclear on requirements. As a result, over 75% of the time devoted to the design phase of this project was spent in learning. Although the team had not learned everything it needed to know, time pressures forced it to move ahead with whatever knowledge it had gained.”
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“Generally speaking, any mechanism that can help teams cope—for example, communicate more ef�…#
“Generally speaking, any mechanism that can help teams cope—for example, communicate more efficiently or reduce the need to communicate, anticipate and explain events and member actions, learn who knows what or where to find expertise, figure out who did what and when on particular task activities, and who is around—has the potential to offset some of the coordination problems. We expect this to be true for both collocated and geographically distributed collaboration.”
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Similar shared space/ambient signals lost to automated systems: “Notice how much of the knowledge discussed here is available at relatively low cost in “open” work environments involving multiple human agents. For example, in older, hardwired control centers, individual controllers can often infer what other controllers are working on just by observing which displays or control panels they are attending to.”
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In Slack, nobody can see your over the ear headphones.
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From the first article, although I wonder if this is because there is/was no other forum for serendipity. Saying “the water cooler was broken” would be an interesting discussion starter for project retro.
“Furthermore, studies have shown that a substantial amount of coordination in software development takes place through informal encounters and meetings in public places such as the water cooler or coffee room [47, 63], which does not happen when members are separated by distance.”
Mastodon Source 🐘#
Alternatively, sometimes the most important component is the one no one has ever recognized: “And they realized: Irving & his trip was the missing secret ingredient”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3140528
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“Many of these tasks don’t make it onto the roadmap, because when I look at the overhead of c…#
“Many of these tasks don’t make it onto the roadmap, because when I look at the overhead of creating a ticket, discussing it in planning, advocating for it–then I can’t. It isn’t worth that. I can’t justify any particular one.”
https://jessitron.com/2023/01/16/resilience-and-waste-in-software-teams/