By Amanda Dudley – Imagine you’ve been commissioned by a college essay writing service to develop a new web application. It’ll involve design, databases, cryptography, and networking. You need to have a team that works well together. In today’s agefreelancers are often used by companies. It’s important your business has a good culture and environment that lets freelancers slide in easily.
Pair up and program
Arguably the best way to improve collaboration among employees is pair programming. This can either be a core part of your development strategy or something that you run as independent sessions. The second option is useful for developing coordination between parts of your team that usually would not work directly together.
50 hours is apparently the amount of time an average adult needs to spend with a person in order to consider them a casual friend. This figure comes from a study that was published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. The study goes on to posit that it’ll take 200 hours to become close friends.
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While we’re not expected to become friends with our colleagues, proximity and a good working relationship are vital to sustainable success. We maybe have had rocky yet creative and powerful work relationships in the past, but everyone can agree that a solid and steady team environment is best in the long run – for your health if nothing else.
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So, 50 hours is needed to form a casual relationship. This number can be approached by running a week-long pair programming session, if you do this periodically, you can create relationships between different members of your team, and different departments over the course of a year.
Projects in these weeks can be work-related, or if you’re really looking to build team spirit, they could be something fun; decide what this means to your team, it could be a hackathon where they work together on cracking the codes of a virtual escape room, or it could look more like a regular team-building session with outdoor activities and shared meals.
If you want your team to cooperate, then it’s important to get in lots of practice. Any collaboration effort can be speeded along by simply doing more of it, more often.
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To pair-program, there are several techniques. In one popular iteration, one person tells the other person what to type. These roles are stuck to very strongly. The person typing cannot come up with their own ideas until a wall has been hit. They must go with exactly what their guide is telling them. This method works great for skilling up your programmers, if you pair a weaker coder with a strong one, they will get some vicarious knowledge of what it’s like to work at a high level.
Meta-analysis suggests that pairs will generally consider many more ways of designing the code than solo workers. The paired group will also end up using a much simpler version, in addition to catching any bugs earlier.
Before starting a new software project, the company needs to ensure that they have the right team members aboard. In many cases, there are just not enough software developers with similar skills and expertise to start the project. One solution would be “team extension”. This is a practice often used to find software developers that have specific skills for a particular project.
A round of code golf
Code golf is a game where players trying to write the shortest possible code to implement a specific algorithm. Computer scientist Andrey Kolmogorov is known for Kolmogorov complexity, a concept that is similar to code gold, it’s the shortest possible string capable of producing something. Therefore code golf is the practice of reducing Kolmogorov complexity.
Code golf meanwhile was coined in 1999 and first played with Perl. Nowadays the game is played on forums, in educational settings, and in team-building events.
Examples of ‘holes’ include printing numbers of a certain characteristic like primes or abundant numbers, creating constants, calculating Levenshtein distances, or translating numerals from Roman to Arabic.
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Code reviews and crits
A good old-fashioned code review is another means of improving team cooperation. They’re important to run as they will improve code quality and stability. The sessions shouldn’t last for longer than 60 minutes. Everyone needs to take a proper break after this, even squeeze in a small break about halfway through the session.
You should also check no more than four hundred lines of code at any one time. To make sure everyone understands the general project, do a presentation at the start, then make sure attention is kept on those specific four hundred lines. Don’t go looking down rabbit holes.
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In summation, improving flows of communication between team members will lift the quality of your organizations’ code. There are several ways of doing this, the article suggests pair programming, building professional relationships, playing games, and conducting code reviews.
Amanda Dudley is a Ph.D. holder, college lecturer, and academic consultant at EssayUSA. Her work involves American and World History, while she is also active in developing educational techniques for students with learning difficulties. Amanda enjoys hiking, reading, and listening to classical music when she’s not editing or giving a talk on the origins of the US Constitution.
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