- Build a good team. Keep management overhead and bullshit to a minimum. Motivate people by giving them really good people to work with and not pulling crap compensation games.
- Do your product three or four times. Rule of thumb: When you're absolutely sick of re-writing the thing and you're ready to work on something else (probably at about this many repetitions) you're reaching the point where you have a decent solution.
- Work on something hard and fun that people actually want to buy.
- If someone in management tries to cram a methodology down your throat, or a salesman knocks on your door with a rad new way to do scrum, kill them and stuff the body with all the other miserable wastes of oxygen who tried to bamboozle you with snake oil.
I dunno. This stuff is just bloody hard, and every silver bullet I've ever seen -- especially the ones that management loves or that use the word "paradigm" in their literature -- has been a dud.
Things go wrong in a team (with or without a particular silver bullet) when there are bad or unmotivated programmers, or when there are no experienced leads to pass the wisdom.
Recruiter more often than not don't realize this is a sure recipe for failure. As studies don't produce software engineers but merely (in the best case) algorithm engineers, and as software engineering is not a thing yet, the only thing we can rely on is the past successes of experienced individuals.
Methodologies won't remove complexity but only provide an additional (time-consuming) component to your complexity average that will make things look a bit better on a cursory glance but won't reduce at all your codebase complexity and maintenance costs.
Try instead to make your team spend half of its time doing simple things totally unrealted to your project or product (like piling cubes all day long) and you'll feel the exact same relief (half better) and have the exact same productivity gain (zero).
- Build a good team. Keep management overhead and bullshit to a minimum. Motivate people by giving them really good people to work with and not pulling crap compensation games.
- Do your product three or four times. Rule of thumb: When you're absolutely sick of re-writing the thing and you're ready to work on something else (probably at about this many repetitions) you're reaching the point where you have a decent solution.
- Work on something hard and fun that people actually want to buy.
- If someone in management tries to cram a methodology down your throat, or a salesman knocks on your door with a rad new way to do scrum, kill them and stuff the body with all the other miserable wastes of oxygen who tried to bamboozle you with snake oil.
I dunno. This stuff is just bloody hard, and every silver bullet I've ever seen -- especially the ones that management loves or that use the word "paradigm" in their literature -- has been a dud.