JavaZone 2010 - Decision Making in Software Teams
Alistair Cockburn has described software development as a game in which we choose among three moves: invent, decide, and communicate. Most of our time at No Fluff is spent learning how to be better at inventing. Beyond that, we understand the importance of good communication, and take steps to improve in that capacity. Rarely, however, do we acknowledge the role of decision making in the life of software teams, what can cause it to go wrong, and how to improve it.
In this talk, we will explore decision making pathologies and their remedies in individual and team dimensions. We'll consider how our own cognitive limitations can lead us to to make bad decisions as individuals, and what we might do to compensate for those personal weaknesses. We'll learn how a team can fall into decision-making dysfunction, and what techniques a leader might employ to healthy functioning to an afflicted group.
Software teams spend a great deal of time making decisions that place enormous amounts of capital on the line. Team members and leaders owe it to themselves to learn how to make them well.
Tim Berglund
Tim Berglund runs a consulting firm called the August Technology Group (http://augusttechgroup.com), which provides training and development services to customers building web applications with open-source tools running on the JVM. He likes it best when these include Groovy and Grails.
His technology interests span web applications, business integration, data architecture, and software architecture, but his greatest passion is to help developers improve in their craft. He is a speaker internationally and at on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour in the United States, and helps lead IASA Denver (http://iasadenver.org) and the Denver Open Source User Group (http://denveropensource.org) in the Denver area.
He lives in Littleton, CO with the wife of his youth and their three children.