It takes collaboration to work effectively as a team.
Lots of people seem to think that AI tools will speed up development because these type code faster than people. This misses a key point of software development.
Software development was never about the speed of typing for developers. It was always about the speed of thinking and communicating in the team to build the application, or add the new feature. AI doesn’t speed up the thinking and communicating.
Guide your people to better collaboration
We need to teach people in teams how to communicate in their team to foster better/more collaboration. This is the key. The team need to share their thinking and build an agreed upon shared understanding between themselves and any relevant outside stakeholders.
By doing this the team ensures they are going in the right direction, and that they are building the right thing too.
This is why the collaboration rules are so important. These rules ensure the team does collaborate, and do the work together. Instead of team members syncing their work to a regular cadence, by collaborating to do the work together, the team gains the best of each person as they do the work at the same time.
Teach your people to do the work together, and you can do better work. Speed is not everything, collaboration is more important. Collaboration uses everyone’s ideas, keeps the team aligned on their goals and work too.
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.