Team Monash: Outwit, Outplay, Outlast

The sum is greater than the parts; how making alliances can help you and your tribe. Techniques and tools for improving development teams.

Outwit: Developers face similar challenges everyday. They need to provide increasingly complex and innovative solutions, yesterday and under budget. This talk will outline how making alliances (read: teams) has helped the my.monash portal development team earn immunity.

Outplay: Successfully used practices that will be covered include: peer code review, source code management (SMC) notifications, design discussions, code documentation standards and sandboxed environments. These techniques and tools are used both formally and informally to assist the team.

Outlast: Eventually an immunity challenge will be lost and having a strong tribe practices will give maintenance benefits, even it if is only yourself in size months after moving onto another challenge. New tribe members can also be initiated more effectively with documentation in place and also contribute to the team knowledge base by using a wiki.

Attendees will learn processes used successfully by our development team and should come away with some ideas that they may be able to use to enhance their own teams, whether in a physical office or virtual team, collaborating on an open source project.

This talk is complemented by Team Monash: The Tribe Has Spoken, which covers the application and enforcement of internal development standards.