Development without talking is painfully slow.
Dave Farley recently asked on LinkedIn “What’s the one development practice you’ve seen make the biggest impact on a team’s success (or failure)?” and I found the answers interesting. Maybe I sought confirmation bias, but I noticed that many mentioned talking and listening.
Software development for me is all about talking and listening. You listen to people’s challenges and envision how software might help them remove some of the challenge. You talk and listen to them and your team to co-create a potential solution. Then you talk and listen to your team as you develop and build the potential solution. You listen more to the original people to see if your solution works as intended, or still needs more work.
Software development is more about talking and listening than sitting and typing. You need to spend time listening too. Following this you also do lots of thinking and conferring with others to test your ideas. All of this is before you type.
Once you do start to code, then you’re also testing assumptions. Writing tests, showing your work to others, and getting feedback on what you’re doing. You are not working in isolation. You are not on your own, you are part of a team.
Even when you’re the only developer, you still have a client, or ideal client, who inspired you to create this application. You’ll be talking to that person, those people.
Software development is a social activity. You talk to your fellow developers, and you talk to others on the team too. You also talk to people who might be using your product too. All of this talking provides more feedback to improve your product. Providing information to fill in gaps, fix issues, and making the code more robust as you refactor while you work.
Teach people sociable development
Listen to what others are saying. Provide your humble ideas. Listen to their response. Co-create a path together as you ask questions and provide answers too. This is the social and human side of software engineering. Teach your people to listen and be humble. This is more important than the coding as it will clarify what you’re building, and stop you building the wrong thing.
Your development needs to be sociable. You benefit from others’ feedback, so be open to listening and talking. Take time, and help others see the need for this too. Being sociable allows you to benefit from other perspectives. This helps your work.
This post is part of a project pulling together my materials and ideas about Teaching Team Collaboration: the Human-Side of Software Development for software development to students.
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The ideas above are from my book 101+ Ideas to Improve Team Collaboration, which covers all of these little things that students can do to improve their collaboration. Also available via Kindle.