Team

During my first week of residency I had the opportunity to join a team of other residents on an 8th Light internal project. For the past couple months I’ve been focused almost entirely on working through my own lessons and working by myself, so this was my first time in a while getting to pair program and participating in daily stand-ups and the weekly demo and IPM.

I started out planning to pair with Darek for half-a-day on a spike to figure out requirements for a future story— but then Darek got pulled into his pairing tour early. That left me as the person holding the knowledge we gained, so I took over the story and the responsibility of transferring that knowledge to the rest of the team so we could best determine what to do with it.

Getting the chance to work with the other residents (Ben, Chris, Cymen and Michael) as well as a “customer” (Angelique) was awesome and reminded me of one of the most pleasantly surprising and important lessons that I discovered early on about software development: that building great software is a hugely collaborative and social endeavor. Getting to spend time with the team and the customer last week reminded me how important (and interesting) it is to include different perspectives, background and knowledge to produce the best possible product. Each of the residents has a unique background and approaches problems differently. Whereas the past couple of months working alone it felt like the walls of my own head were significant boundaries, while listening to the other residents and discussing the challenges it immediately felt like my knowledge was expanding beyond those walls. It also doesn’t hurt that Micah is with us in a lot of our meetings and during the IPM. Having his perspective during the IPM on what to expect in an actual situation with customers (although Angelique can certainly be tough) helps prepare us even more for that next step.