Programming in Teams

Why program in a team?
- Common sense
- Science supports common sense :
  Woolley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi, Malone. Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups, Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1193147
  
  Psychologists have repeatedly shown that a factor called “collective intelligence” emerges from the correlations among groups of people's performance on a wide variety of cognitive tasks. In two studies with 699 individuals, working in groups of two to five, we find converging evidence of a general collective intelligence factor that explains a group's performance on a wide variety of tasks. This “c factor” is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group.
- Our personal experience at the school
- That is how human civilization works!
What are the problems?
- Communicating
- Planning
- Distributing
- The psychological factor: the humble type, the showy type
Suggestions:
- Sprint-based development
- Communicating:
  - meetings (presentations/progress reports), online (mailing-lists, IRC, Wiki), commit messages!
  - listen, consider every idea, think before you speak
  - give and accept feedback, only constructive criticism, self-criticism, ask and offer for help (no need to be ashamed)
  - don't bypass team-mates, no blaming look for a solution instead
  - thanks and tributes
  - learn from your experience
- Planning and Distributing:
  - deadlines, milestones
  - identify work packages
  - identify skills and preferences in the team
  - check progress
  - identify bottlenecks
  - flexible use of resources
- The Question of the Leadership:
  - do you need a leader?
  - a tyrant? a benevolent dictator? a release manager? a spokesperson?
  - plutocracy, aristocracy, democracy, do-ocracy, anarchy?