I was working as a Senior developer for this company in Brazil when I start to get more responsibilities as a technical leader, not officially, but as I had the trust of everybody it was something that naturally came up. Anyway, it was something new for me and I’ve accepted as a challenge.
So I started to learn more about leadership.
as a leader
In that time we were working with big legacy software and the development methodology was some kind of waterfall-like, which was another problem, the development team was composed of 5 or 7 developers and we also had BA, QA and so on. A big team with extraordinary people. And I can say that for sure because we reach a point where we were delivering 0 to 1 bugs on pre-production for every 400 hours of development.
But, there was a situation, that happened a few times, when developers and QAs got stuck in an infinite loop of open/close bugs and it’s really frustrating. It makes them sad and tired, both sides. The first time it happened I’ve realized that my duty was to take the job away from the developer and give him a brand new, well-shaped and with less pressure.
Not that I thought the guy was not able to solve and fix everything, but I knew that it was not healthy at all and I even though I didn’t like so much of the task, I took it and finished. Unfortunately, for the QA developer, there was no way out.
In the end, the feature was delivered with a few bugs on pre-production and I can explain why. With limited time, under pressure, the QA and I were not able to test some of the cases after so many attempts because he was so much into that infinite loop that his test went to a vicious cycle.
Later on, I’ve talked with the QA manager, he asked me what he could have done differently, I told him that a leader should do the things that the ones under his command don’t want to do. Not my words, by the way.
about a leader
Do you know Simon Sinek? then watch this TED talk from 2014. It’s inspired me and I hope it inspires you.
Why good leaders make you feel safe..
It’s not an easy path, you need to improve your skills and keep studying, but more importantly, you need to listen to people’s feedback. And this I learned from one of my managers at that time, he has sent me a form with four simple questions - asking me to provide him feedback about his work.
Great idea, later on, I did the same and it was great because for the first time I’ve received some constructive criticism and I could improve myself.
the plan and the results
At some point, I was really confident and I had the company trust so I decided to create a plan to move to the next level of leadership: help them to create a culture.
As I mentioned before, we were using waterfall but at some point in the future an agile knowledge will be required and as I’ve already had some experience with scrum, as the first step, I decided to put some ceremonies on practice, like daily, planning and review. It didn’t work very well this mixture of waterfall and agile, but at least improved the team interaction.
In the second step, we start two funny activities for every end of “sprint”: lightning talks and coding dojo (or kata).
The lightning talks were basically two talks of 15 minutes each where someone from the team shows some new technology or whatever nice stuff that had in mind.
With coding dojo, someone from the team creates a challenge the others with some exercise and a prize. If the team fails, the challenger wons the prize, otherwise, it goes to the team.
We’ve done it like 5 times each of these activities.
I was also planning other activities, like hackathons, but unfortunately, things moved on to another direction and all gone.
Even though, it was a really great time working with amazing people, working hard and delivering great software. And the memories remain.