managing two teams

[orengolan]

managing two teams

I am going to manage two teams of developers. One team consist of 5 developers, and the other consist 2 or 3 and located in china. We develop in .net 1.1 but moving to 2.0 next week. I would like to get some advice about the problems I might face. 1. Language barrier – If their English is not good I might need to use messenger(!) 2. Consistent Code – common tools and methodologies – FXCop for naming convention, Sharing the same file server and DB and using source control tool. 3. Integration - make sure the distant team develops separate components (Component=class) And make an integration plan graph. 4. Assign a single component to one developer only to avoid conflicts. Any advice, ideas, or tools would be great! here is a great audio of Juval Lowy about Project Planning and Tracking​

 

[arnonrgo]

Remote Mgmt

Regarding 1. I can't really help you on that - I agree that it can be a serious problem - It is very important that at least one of the remote team members (preferably the team-leader) would be able to communicate with you freely and on a day-to-day basis). Also while remote managment is "doable" - In my experience you still need to travl to the remote location from time-to-time Regarding 2. Consider using a source control software that supports multi-sites (e.g. Rational Clear-Case)- one project I worked on used CVS and FTP (for Unix development) and it was pretty damn hard. Using multi-site clear case (on another occasion) proved much better (though it required careful setup and planning to get it working) Regarding 3. I would try to find a more coarse-grained separation than class level to partition the work between the sites. Try to keep devide to work to as independent modules as possible. Pay special attention to cross-site dependency and scheduling - esp. if you are going to develop some common tools/framework. (if/when you have cross-site dependecies you need to pay more attention to documentation and examples) Also you need to consider the time-differences your would have to be available at the remote site's working hours (at least partially) (In case you are wondering about my credentials on this matter - among other things, I used to manage 20+ people that where devided between Haifa, Tel-Aviv and Toronto (for a customer in San-Francisco and Dallas)) I'll try to think of more pointers.. Arnon​

 

[arnonrgo]

Two more points

Consider using automated tools for code review (e.g. making sure developers follow coding standards) like MS's FxCop (integrated with VS 2005) or the one in DevPartner Studio (easier to extend and change than FxCop) I didn't write it explicitly in the previous answer - I think it is very important to follow the contract first appraoch. Again this will help you reduce schedule dependencies between the groups.