Volley and Engineering teams
My school didn’t have a schoolyard; during physical education time, a whole group of 35 children would walk 10 minutes up the street to the nearest soccer field for years.
Our mission was to get to the field to play Brilé:
Brilé (dodgeball, prisoner ball…)
In this game there are two teams, and the goal is to hit anyone on the opposing team with the ball to knock them out of the game (the “burned” players) until all the players on the other team are eliminated.
Brilé is a cooperative game used in physical education exercises to develop skill, quick movements, visual acuity, control, and mastery of the body.
In the case of Brilé, even though it’s a game that requires two teams, the skills developed and needed are largely individual. “If you stay in long enough, your team wins.”
What skills are needed in a software development team? Is your individual skill more important, or the one that forms from the collective skills of your team?
In much of the literature and studies we find on Teams, Effectiveness, Team Performance, and organizations, references to sports are inevitable when looking for patterns or models to build on. Every company, entrepreneur, or team goes in search of the magic recipe to create the winning team, a team with many skills.
We also find a variety of definitions for “group” or “team.” Use whichever term you prefer; I will always be referring to:
Organized group of people that works together to achieve a common goal
What is my team’s sport?
If the team I work on, instead of solving software problems, were a sports team, what team would we be?
I think we would be… a volleyball team.
Without getting into how many members a software team should or shouldn’t have, that would be an article in itself, let’s note that in volleyball a full team can be made up of up to 14 players (12 plus 2). There are also different strategies for how to position players according to their skills and level of training: a 5–1 offense or a 4–2 offense. (Hitters and setters)
Let’s assume that we consider a “match” to be the development of a new feature or a group of tasks to achieve an objective at any given time, an Epic, a Story, etc.
One of the most notable characteristics of volleyball, and the one that drew me in, is that all players have to practice all roles; they practice rotation. Players rotate their positions as they score points, so everyone has to know the different aspects of the game.
Rotation reduce knowledge hoarding
In development teams, rotation between tasks is very important for sharing knowledge and avoid the issue of knowledge hoarding; we try to make an effort to understand those tasks we haven’t had to work on. When it comes to rotating between roles such as QA and Frontend, or DevOps and Frontend, for example, it can be complicated, but would you at least be able to explain what your Frontend teammate is working on if you are Backend or QA?
Here are some actions we practice daily to encourage that transfer, and that help us not die of stress when the person who developed one of the most important pieces of the code goes on vacation.
Rotating doesn’t mean we all have to be experts in every position or role, but in volleyball, as in development teams, this is a key factor.
But what else do teams have in common with volleyball?
It’s also important that each of us is in the right position when the match begins.
Our positions on the court:
Backend: like the back-row player, it’s responsible for putting the ball into play. In a new Story or EPIC, the backends start working first, paving the way for the rest of the players (the Frontends, for example).
Frontend: like the hitter, its mission is to build that good final pass on top of the backend’s work.
Operations: like the libero, it can go in and out of the game and its specialty is defense. In our case this role is in charge of protecting the rest of the team from any interruption while the other members work on the main goal. (We would also refer to DevOps and QA in this section.)
The Facilitator (Lead and/or the technical architect): like the setter, their purpose is to distribute the ball under optimal conditions throughout the game across the different zones. The whole team should master this position. (Here you could include roles such as the Product Owner or the Designer/UX depending on the team’s management.)
How to combine individual skills to generate greater richness is, for me, one of the fundamental keys that is hardest to achieve in a team, but at the same time the most exciting.
If your team were a sport, which would it be?
And remember, a single Hitter do not win matches, build a team
