Leading software development teams

Software architecture and architects focus on engineering, business, and the userthe developer experience is usually an afterthought, which impacts the quality of the system being built. Bulama Yusuf discusses the importance of the developer experience and why it is important that the people who are going to build the system be taken into consideration right from the start.

Software architecture and architects focus on engineering, business, and the user—the developer experience is usually an afterthought, which impacts the quality of the system being built. Bulama Yusuf discusses the importance of the developer experience and why it is important that the people who are going to build the system be taken into consideration right from the start. If people aren’t happy, they tend to leave (or worse, stay without buying into the vision of the project or product). No one plans for their people or team members to be unhappy; it is often what doesn’t get done that leads to unhappy people and developers. Computers are predictable, work within fixed parameters and make it relatively easy to design for; people are hard to predict. (You must have heard that before.) A developer who has suddenly been made team lead or has stumbled into the position of software architect might find it easier to handle the technical side of things and struggle to comprehend why little progress ever gets achieved. Bulama shares the mistakes that software architects and team leads generally make and shows how such mistakes can trickle down and affect the velocity of the team or organization as a whole. Along the way, Bulama outlines simple things that can be done to improve the chances that people will be happy and give their best to the team—things like how to actually achieve a shared team understanding and buy-in, when to be firm, when to take a step back and let others lead, how to understand individual team members as much as you should, how to create a predictable environment for people working as part of your development team, and how to minimize conflicts. You’ll leave with ideas on how to better lead your teams and the skills to understand your team members as much as you understand the engineering side of things.