Software Engineering principles to make teams better
I think i’ve got a slightly different take - i’m not saying my take is any better though.If we’re talking engineering principles, not team dynamics, then it’s:  1. Use immutability by default, even in languages that make that harder than it should be
  2. Understand how liberating idempotency is
  3. Divide and conquer, use abstraction to make hard problems manageable
  4. Delete code, delete tests, re-write stuff, re-write it again. Painful? Keep doing this till you get to the other side and feel liberation and empowerment, took me years to get past wincing at the idea of re-writing that thing AGAIN
  5. Pay attention to your build tooling - to do any given task, it should always take exactly 1 command. How do i run the tests? Run the test command. How do i deploy to non-prod? Run the deploy command. Etc

If we’re talking softer stuff:  1. Don’t block collaboration - e.g. if there are 5 people don’t work on 5 tasks concurrently. Work on 1, maybe 2 in some cases
  2. Accomodate 2 types of work: work that needs collaboration & synchronisation (brain storming, planning, why are we even doing this, that kinda thing) work that needs focus time - sometimes that’s focus as an individual, sometimes that’s a mob focussed on one task and saying no to every other distraction in the world no matter how “urgent”
  3. Change what you’re doing throughout the day, don’t try to code all day, you’ll get in a rut, you won’t write your best code after a while. You can optimise this step, e.g. if the team is low energy after lunchtime, use that to your advantage and schedule the easy boring work then, don’t be afraid to use humour or burn low energy time just getting to know each other better
  4. Make sure people are being heard in the team. Hardest point to get right.