Software Managers: Cultivate a "Rockstar Team"

I read an excellent article by Scott Hanselman titled over the weekend, and I agreed with almost every word of it.



There is so much emphasis these days on individual achievement and "lone wolf" success that people easily forget software development is largely a team activity.




At , most of our customers are software managers with challenges that stem from the nature of their large and often distributed software teams.



In many cases, they will admit that it's nice to have some genuine "rockstar" performers, but what they really need is a team that can deliver high quality, bug free code on time and at scale.



A "rockstar team" to quote Mr. Hanselman.



When you look at the mix of skills and experience in most software teams, it's no surprise that getting some consistency in programming skills and raising the bar on code standards is high on the priority list.



For example, one of our largest healthcare clients is migrating thousands of developers from legacy systems over to .NET and while many of their developers have multiple years of coding experience, they are new to managed code and developing with the .NET framework.



Training and skills development are a necessity, rather than a nice-to-have, in this scenario.



Other clients are acquiring competitors and bringing hundreds and often thousands of developers onto their development platform and toolset, not to mention adopting their coding standards and best practices. Time is not on your side as a development manager in this situation; you need a custom learning program to train these new developers and a learning platform to track the results in real-time.



When faced with large scale, organization wide challenges like these, rockstar programmers are a helpful addition but the real endgame for most of our customers is to get everyone on the software team performing to a high level, working on their coding skills, and mastering many different aspects of application development, testing, and deployment.



In situations like this, our fits the bill and we can show real value to software organizations over many years. The "rockstar team" isn't built in a day but it's an admirable goal for any development manager facing the challenges of running a successful software team.
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