DawnBringer3D Tips & Tricks, Personal News, Game Development

Engineer Team Discipline

The problem with programming teams in general is that they miss discipline. If you have more than one programmer it is a team then it needs rules and somebody too look after that those rules aren’t broken by anybody!

If there would not be anyone looking after them they would go ’solo’ and that causes some serious problems. Engineer team needs rules, to name a few important ones :

• Coding Practices
• Rules for using perforce or other programs like it.
• Development Practices
  • General Agile, test driven development, …
  • Scrum, daily meetings, …
  • Extreme Programming, pair programming…

Well organized teams can be very effective when again teams that aren’t taken care of can kill the performance. I have seen this happening couple of times. First of all to start repairing the damages you need a chief engineer who is responsible for looking after other engineers. Chief engineer needs to be somebody who has the balls to say when things aren’t going right and do something about it. But, he or she should also be diplomatic to not cause any unnecessary problems.

After you have appointed the chief engineer it is time for him / her to act and start applying the rules one by one with the team. Notice that chief engineer is still part of the team – if the project fails, the team fails.