Managing Development Teams

Kind of Development
Team Size
Context
Management Method
Challenge
Introductions
Bernard works at SLAC and they do a lot of different development but classic web app. They have 5 people and the global team is about 30 in 5 labs around the world. The context is a small team embedded in a bigger team.  Their management method is scrum gravitating to Agile.  Bernard has scrum master certification and he has a fundamental problem where there are 5 different labs with different reporting lines etc. This is his major challenge
Richard Weber from SUL
They have a couple teams and they do development around java, backend and front end angular JS. The team is 5 developers, 2 QA and [something]. The biggest challenge is figuring out what to build and what to buy.
Peter from DLSS and the team is 3-4 who work mostly on Ruby on Rail to build Sarch works and some collection sites. They do scrum and Agile and how well depends on the team and who’s on it.  They track stories and iterations and deploying often. The challenges are that we have too many projects to work on so prioritization is a challenge so we compromise on quality sometimes. The stories is 1-2 weeks to a month.
Mike from Stanford Center of Professional Development. We have two teams that have 4 people each and program in PHP for classroom instruction and student registration. There is a lot of pushback from the community.
Srinivas from AS – we support OSR. We development team of 6 people + QA.  Sprint planning 2-3 weeks and release 8-10 weeks. Challenges include a shippable product in a sprint with QA being done
Supriya from LBRE – Applications group – part Agile, part classic – 4-5 developers.
Roberta from SLAC – informal situation doing development for her department with one person and here to see how it’s supposed
Diane from VPUE – 3 developers and classical development cycle. They support Java/Oracle web based apps.  Their biggest challenge is how to prioritize.  
Carol from SWS – Team is 8 people and we break into smaller teams for projects.  We develop sites varying from simple to complex. We use and Agile method with 1-2 week sprints. Understanding Stanford
Brad Immanuel from CRC team – there are developers to handle the desktop tools for Stanford Desktop Tools for campus. There are 3 people who work on various management methodologies depending on the group they are working with.  Brad just inherited this team and so it’s a challenge.  
Shannon Santanocito from CRC – more on OPS with CRC and works with Brad’s group. They help her team do internal automation. Shannon wants to hear how people are developing and how to work with them etc.
Anne Pinkowski of Application Support in IT Services – We work with commercial off the shelf tools and build tools from the ground up.  We are 12 people – 4 full time developers and 8 developer/application administrator. We support 19 tools for the University and we use classical and agile and we are always challenged by managing the pipeline.
Susan Watkins from GSB who is interested in hearing about managing development teams. Drupal is the platform and we have 2.something developers, and we have UX people and scrum masters etc. They use Agile but really … 2 week sprints generally. Managing the backlog is a challenge. How do I know if I am getting what I should?
Karen from University of Montana – We support Banner and everything that goes along with it. We created a web application for reporting out of the system. We develop in PLSQL and working toward Ruby on Rails. We have 8 people – we manage through Agile or pair programming and have 3 open reqs.
Tony Christopher in Medical School Library – Technology and Customer Support. We are responsible for the website which is a web app – 3 Java developers, a UX designer, and a jack of all trades for usability testing and server configuration.  Customer Support is separate. We do different types of searches focused on the medical center – image searching, etc. He’s here to listen and learn.
Richard from Lab in SoM – small team that developers websites and webapps PHP, Drupal, Java, Python, etc. Hoping to learn more about what people are doing
Megan from GSB is a front end developer and the team is slim and there are openings for 2.5 people and she would like to hear about how developers can influence other
Adam from GSB – he’s the .something… and ditto on what Megan and Susan said.
Tanya from SoE – Hybrid under marketing and communications but responsible of website. One developer and working with SWS and pulling as many resources as they can for their site.
Charlene Beavers Princeton University – Central IT Support Services – PM for client software deployments. In those projects we have web application tools that we provide and offer webapps to the departments to get data about the machines that they support.  No programmers in their department and begging for development time to help them – when they get a resource they want to be efficient as possible.
Lydia works with Richard Weber in SUL – 4 developers is mostly Agile and still struggling with that.
Discussion:
Bernard discussed the challenge of managing a devops team and how production always steals from development.  The best practices in the industry have changed to include devops and so if there is a talk about that, then people should attend. There was discussion about Git, Github, etc. One thing that SUL has tried to do a better job at being more selective in what they work on – bugs etc. Sometimes not doing the work is the best solution. Keeping production and adding enhancements is a challenge but then others will buy 3rd party solutions and then they are stuck supporting those as well. ON some projects it’s hard to manage release cycles because of interruptions from the Dean/VIP etc. Frequent release cycles helps with this. Richard mentioned that Production Critical work will be accounted for in a dot release. Many people talked about setting expectations. Peter mentioned that his master branch in Git must always be deployable which allows them to deploy whenever they need to. Susan mentioned that everyone is trying to do Agile. If they think there will be 6 sprints, they plan for 8.  Richard mentioned that they have 3 weeks sprints and sometimes they take a week to catch up and cleanup before the next sprint. Bernard asked if anyone tried to leverage Agile and had to walk away from it.  Megan was at a smaller company and the team was ready for Agile but the client wasn’t so they went back to waterfall.  Bernard mentioned that waterfall implies you get everything (but never do) and Agile is about prioritizing the important things.  Peter also mentioned that Agile is perceived as a bigger time commitment than waterfall. Susan wondered how often we looked back at story points to see if they were effective. Others chimed in that they do leverage lessons learned.
While there are technical challenges, there are also people challenges – like prima donnas. It’s not worth someone who is an expert if the team is disruptive. You don’t always know who the prima donna is when you hire them. Put the team in charge of the team. As a manager/leader is to instill the vision and let the team make the decisions to execute it.