9
donuts
6y

Does anyone else have experience on a team where everyone seems to be doing their own thing across the full stack/multiple systems/languages but then they're all stepping over each other, breaking other each other's code so ends up doing a lot of rework to update your code to someone else's change.

And also many wheels get reinvented in slightly different ways because no one is aware that something like ... Already exists and can be reused or refactor.... Or how to use it correctly.

Basically we're like all moving in different directions instead of in sync.

I feel maybe the team is too big and everyone is doing everything, wearing too many hats... and maybe should define roles and ownership better.

Comments
  • 2
    I am guilty.

    I have a similar problem, except I am the only dev for almost all of my projects so I find at times I end up reinventing the wheel for something simply because I failed to remember that something similar exists in the code base already. I also jump between stacks and platforms in different languages so that really doesn’t help at times.
  • 1
    I find that is usually the case when "feature teams" are used. When management views a team as the smallest unit and assigns work to teams rather than to individuals, the result is frequently that the work cannot be reasonably divided amongst the devs. You get people stepping on each others toes a lot. Recently we had a team where 3 people were working in the same file at the same time (a single dialog code file). My first guess is that you are witnessing poor management. If aired, your concerns might get addressed. It's worth speaking up.
  • 1
    Pull/merge requests, where at least two others of the team must look at, worked good for us. Also daily standup meetings with the ususal "what did I do yesterday" and "what will I do today" helped. It is also important that the user stories are self-contained, so that large merge conflicts are avoided, since a user story ideally does not (or at least not greatly) change the code of other areas. User stories with overlapping areas have caused the biggest merge conflicts for us. When two developers must work on the same functionality at the same time, they coordinate closely. But we try to avoid editing a feature with two developers at the same time.
  • 0
    Given who this was posted by, I thought this was going to eventually be an ad for GitHub.

    Some of the comments are coming close.. 🤔
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