Just One New Practice

For example, consider this story of one of Andy’s former clients. The team had beautiful offices lined up in a graceful curve along the outside wall of a towering glass office building. Everyone had a window view, and the entire team ringed about half of the building. But there were problems. Releases were running late, and bugs were escalating out of control.

So in the usual fashion, the Pragmatic Programmers started on one end of the offices and began interviewing the team to find out what they were working on, what was working well, and what things were in the way. The first fellow explained that they were building a client-server application, with a razor-thin client and a fat server containing all the business logic and database access.

But as the interviewing progressed down the long line of offices, the story slowly changed. The vision of the project drifted a little bit with each person. Finally, the last person at the end of the line proudly explained the system as being a fat client, containing all the GUI and business logic, with nothing on the server except a simple database!

It became clear that the team never got together to talk about the project; instead, each team member only ever talked to the person immediately next to them. Just as in a school kid’s game of “telephone,” the message inevitably gets corrupted and distorted as it passes from person to person.

The pragmatic advice? Start using the stand-up meeting immediately (see ​Schedule Regular Face Time​). The results were fast and amazing. Not only did the architectural issues get quickly resolved, but something deeper happened. The team began to jell—began to form a cohesive unit, working together. Bug rates fell, the product became more stable, and deadlines weren’t as deadly.

It didn’t take long, and it didn’t take a lot of effort. It required some discipline to stick with the meeting, but even that soon became a habit. It was just one new practice, but it made a huge difference to the team.