Chris Searle

Most students coming out of university these days are completely clueless when it comes to computer programming. This seems to be getting worse for every year. However, in between all the garbage (where garbage in this context means students not really interested in or capable of programming a computer) there are some really exceptional and brilliant talents that might just need a few more years of experiences to become really efficient superprogrammers. This number is growing. The challenge is to find and recognize these talents, and are they willing to work for you?

I believe the next generation of superprogrammers is to be found in the free and open source software communities. They have little motivation to work with traditional closed source and proprietary software. Why should they? Yes, they want to work on challenging and interesting software projects, but also they want to share their best ideas with others - where the latter is perhaps the most important motivation factor. They want their work to be viewed by others, they want respect, recognition and to be admired by their friends, they want to be part of a world-wide community. In order to hire these people you need to realize that money, internal recognition and a “career” is not enough. You might need to change your business strategy.

Consider hiring a brilliant poet, painter or musician where the message is that their work can only be presented, displayed or heard inside the company - a ridiculous proposal and of course they will refuse. The same thing is true for the next generation of superprogrammers. Given a choice they will work for a company where their work is visible for the outside world, or even better, where their work is a contribution to the software community as a whole.

We see already that many companies have a hard time realizing the impact of free and open source software. Those who do not get it will die. Those who manage to attract the next generation of superprogrammers will win.

It is about 10 years since the first time I participated in a project using daily stand-up meeting. I was immediately fascinated. Since then I have always encouraged development teams to do daily stand-up meetings and to get rid of the traditional weekly status meeting.

Modern software development is about taking advantage of the fact that most often you have a group of very intelligent and capable individuals working together as a team. Given accurate information developers will know what is the right thing to do for the project to succeed. Given enough freedom (this is often forgotten) the developers will also be able to do the right thing. The daily stand-up meeting is an effective mechanism for making sure that everybody on the team have enough information to do the right thing.

There are a lot of formats for running the daily stand-up meeting (ref). But common for most of them is that everybody on the team should answer three questions in this particular order:

1. Did?
2. Will Do?
3. Impediments?

Sometimes I observe stand-up meetings where the third question is skipped. Nobody in the team mentions anything about problems, hindrance, obstacles or anything that impedes their work. It is very unlikely that this is true. In a software project there is always something that can be improved to speed up the team.

Actually, of the three questions, the third question is by far the most important in a daily stand-up meeting. The “Did?” and “Will do?” question is also important, but the information is often also available in the software repository and the task bord. Apart from the daily stand-up meeting, there is often no formal mechanism for making sure that everybody knows about what slows down the team.

Therefore, I propose that we should order the questions according to their importance. Allow me to suggest that in the daily stand-up meeting the team members should answer the following questions:

1. Any impediments in your way?
2. What are you working on today?
3. What have you finished since yesterday?