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Showing posts from May, 2017

Thoughts on Software Development: A recent interview

I had a very productive discussion with a few consultants from India recently. The topic of choice was Software Development: specifically, how best to run teams and a good software development process. Here's a quick summary of what we discussed. Hopefully, this will be helpful to a broad audience: Q1: Team Structure: How best to structure a team, what are the roles and responsibilities? A: Largely, teams in tech are structured with 2 leaders: a technical lead and a manager. The role of the technical lead is managing the technical aspects of product development (code reviews, commits, design, testing, client team management and tough debugging). The role of the manager is people management (specifically and preferably practicing "'servant leadership"). The manager is responsible for morale, happiness, compensation, budgeting etc. but is not responsible for the technical direction of the team. In some cases, it makes sense for the technical lead to also be the manager