The purpose of team activities is team information flow: education, coordination, and feedback.

Beginning of the Week (Tuesday)

  • text status updates
    • What have you completed?
    • What are you working on?
    • What do you need help with?
  • Warm Up (5 minutes)
  • Announcements (1 minute)
  • Technical Dive (10 minutes)
  • Questions or help, stick around.

End of the Week (Thursday)

  • Short Recorded Demos - two to five minutes each x2
    • share comments in the chat
  • Retrospective (20 minutes)
    • Text reply to:
      • What went well?
      • What could have been better? Why? How?
    • Go over responses
    • Action item pick 1 for next week.

Text Updates

Place text updates in a shared document that everyone can access.

Text updates are a live journal of the teams progress.

Text updates should be done so the most recent entry is at the top of the document.

Text updates:

  • inform teammates who are out what has happened in their absence
  • inform management about progress
  • inform new hires about what the team has been working on
  • look back at what drove various decisions to reflect on overall progress
  • provide links to reference specific code reviews or documents
  • place to ask and answer questions about specific updates
  • are great for asynchronous work, where people are in different timezones and may not be able to make every meeting.

A status update is likely only needed once a week to denote specific progress. However, it can be convenient for the update to be a list of all items significant amounts of time were spent on. More holistic updates give people a clearer picture of what is going on.

Status updates around an area should have the following parts

  • done - what work has been completed since the last update?
  • open - what current work is in progress?
  • next - what work is planned to be opened next?

Warm Up

The warm up is to facilitate people informally talking to each other.

To see people as the people with lives and not just coworkers.

A good warm up might be having someone answer a random question, or organic conversation before a meeting.

Selecting a facilitator

Who should facilitate meetings?

Running the meeting should swap between people on the team so that everyone gets a turn and everyone gets practice so no matter who is out someone is comfortable running things. This also frees specific team members from the burden of always running meetings.

New person should facilitate the meeting after they have been through two weeks of meetings. This is to help the newest person learn the rules of the meetings, and to give them practice.

Technical Dive

Short technical dives help:

  • everyone get up close and personal with what different people are working on
  • everyone on the team practice their presentation skills
  • provide a forced forum for technical feedback

These technical dives should rotate between people on the team.

Assigning a technical dive presentation to new hires can also serve as a way to get a new hire in depth with code since they may need to explain an area that people on the team are already familiar with.

It's difficult to run out of technical dives since there is always new code being written.

Technical dives can be used to share new knowledge learned within the team.

Recorded Demos

Recorded so that they can be referenced in the text updates, and progress can be shown to anyone.

Having a recording also forces a time constraint.

Since the expectation is a demo each week this ensure that progress is being made.

Retrospective

The retrospective is the most important element since it gives a way for people to give feedback on how things are going and suggest improvements.

Team members should write out short answers to the following questions:

  • What went well?
  • What could have been better? How?

The point is to reflect and improve team performance.

Lunch

Getting Lunch together as a team is an important way to build relationships among team members.

A recommendation is having a consistent scheduled lunch at least once a week. One way to make it feel more inclusive is to have someone go around and invite people to lunch.