Woody Zuill’s Software Teaming book.
Turning Up the Good
I’ve been aware of the Mob Programming concept and Woody Zuill’s brilliant contributions in the community for a long time, but only now did I get to read his book Software Teaming (as he now prefers calling it).
Woody puts my thoughts and doubts into words, with powerful one-liners that are hard to disagree with, even if he says he can’t prove 100% what he says 🙂. The book includes too many useful quotes to mention them all here, but here comes a few:
Orchestras are structured deliberately to optimize the flow of the music, not the busyness of the individual musicians.
Most challenges in modern software environments are too complex for an individual, so we assign them to teams. Paradoxically, we then separate the team members and ask them to solve the problems individually. How can we be effective if we separate the people who should be working together?
Software Teaming is not about getting the most work out of each person. It is about getting the best of everyone into everything we do.
I also like Woody’s down-to-earth writing style. He focuses on what has worked for his teams in practice, while sneaking in several lean and agile principles to back it all up (queues, inventory, flow vs. resource optimization, maximizing the amount of work not done
, etc.).
Even if you’re not a programmer, you should still read this book if you work in a team doing any kind of collaborative work—including if you’re a manager or leader helping these teams become effective.
Fantastic book with so many myths busted—thanks Woody! 🙏