Complaints

Do you have the perfect job?, do all your fellows work as you expect?, is your work environment great?. If the answer of all these questions is "YES" then you need to change your job.

If you don't have complaints about your job then there is nothing important to do there, there is nothing to fix. Complaining is a need, an exercise, try to make the complaints a daily thing in your team, list all the problems that people find and try to fix them. Create new tools, talk with your boss, do trainings, try to make your office a better place to work ... so at the end it will became harder and  harder to complain.

Complaining is the key exercise of team's evolution. If you implement complaining as an exercise in your team you will find that at first that the problems are quite trivial, very simple to fix (one or two days of work), but then you'll see that people find more complex things to do.

Try the same experiment I did some time ago, ask your devs about the compiling time of the application, write down all the complaints, get their ideas, reduce the compiling time (as much as you can). Then ask again in a couple of months about the compiling time, you'll get a lot of complaints about it and you'll try to fix them, you will find that doing that is hard, but will make your development times faster and faster, you evolve!. On the other hand, let's say you don't get any complaint about the compiling time, you get another complaint, let's say xUnit coverage, you still evolve because the xUnit coverage was a problem that was hidden by the compiling time problem which everyone was more worried about, now that you solved that you are prepared to fix other issues, as your see, you still evolve!.

Hearing complaints all the time is boring and awful, so try to implement a weekly session of complaints get all your team together and ask them about their problems, talk about them, you'll see everyone will have one!