How To Build a Productive Laravel Team

What does it look like to build a healthy, productive team of Laravel developers? How do you heal a broken team? In this talk, we talk about how to understand the dynamics and processes in and around development teams, both more broadly and specifically in the world of Laravel.

Transcript

1. PRESENTED BY Matt Stauffer @stauffermatt How to build a productive Laravel team
2. • The context • The constraints • The suggestions • The summary Agenda
4. We build & rescue web apps & dev teams
5. Three types of clients: 1. Healthy team 2. No team 3. Unhealthy team
6. Three types of clients: 1. Healthy team 2. No team 3. Unhealthy team Write code, help them code better … & help them hire & build process … & help them fix process & relationships
7. How do we build healthy and productive teams?
8. The context 1
9. THE CONTEXT 1 What is a team?
10. THE CONTEXT 1 What is a team? The team (in this context) is the group of people responsible for building Laravel apps.
11. THE CONTEXT 1 Who’s in our team? Business Design Product Development Dev-ops/IT QA
12. THE CONTEXT 1 Who’s in our team? Business Design Product Development Dev-ops/IT QA BUSINESS ENGINEERING
13. THE CONTEXT 1 What’s in a team? • “Business" & “Engineering” • … and their relationships with each other • … and their relationships with senior leadership • … and their relationships with customers • … and the processes (or lack thereof) 
 that make it all happen
14. THE CONTEXT 1 What’s in a team? 💡 💻
15. The constraints 2
16. THE CONSTRAINTS 2 • Team size • Project scale • Existing tech and structures • Existing team’s capabilities • Cost to hire in your market • Unique constraints of your domain • Deadlines What impacts the decisions you make
17. THE CONSTRAINTS 2 What impacts the decisions you make People.
18. THE CONSTRAINTS 2 • Fear • Ego • Emulation • Consultants • Probably other stu f People are why we get in bad shape
19. The suggestions 3
20. Caveat If you hate my advice…
21. THE SUGGESTIONS 3 • How to build a healthy culture • How to structure a dev team • How to hire developers • How to build product process • How to build development process Our agenda
22. How to build a healthy culture 3a
23. THE SUGGESTIONS: How to Build Product Process 3c • Healthy culture is based on trust, respect, and communication • Lack of trust will turn any organization unhealthy • Engineering leadership: believe in your devs and go to bat for them • Involve devs in feature planning • Engineering leadership and product leadership: trust each other’s priorities and values How to build healthy culture
24. How to structure a dev team 3b
25. THE SUGGESTIONS: How to Structure a Dev Team 3a • Full stack dev teams, preferably 2-4 devs • Max of one junior to every two non-juniors • Each team needs a technical leader (senior dev) and a process leader (PM or senior dev) • Technical ability != Interpersonal leadership skills Dev team shape
26. THE SUGGESTIONS: How to Structure a Dev Team 3a • De fi ne your roles • De fi ne a global quality standard • Senior dev = capable of holding code to your global quality standard • Need someone at the company to de fi ne the global quality standard; or bring in Tighten/etc. Technical Seniority
27. • Junior code has to be reviewed before deploying • Mid code doesn’t need to be reviewed often, but their architecture should be guided • Senior code doesn’t need to be reviewed and their architecture is trusted Tighten’s roles, simplified
28. THE SUGGESTIONS: How to Structure a Dev Team 3a • You run a software company now • Most senior technical person should have: • programming experience • equal power to the leaders of business Structuring the engineering organization
29. How to hire developers 3c
30. THE SUGGESTIONS: How to Hire Developers 3b • Hire full-stack devs • What position are you hiring for? • Seniors need real Laravel experience What to look for
31. THE SUGGESTIONS: How to Hire Developers 3b • Post on Larajobs • Test for real practical things, not linked lists • People can’t always write code on the spot but they can read it! • More than one interviewer at a time 🔑 How to find and interview candidates
32. How to build 
 product process 3d
33. THE SUGGESTIONS: How to Build Product Process 3c • Use “epics” instead of massive spec docs • De fi ne features collaboratively • Give developers fl eshed-out tasks, immediate access to business for clari fi cation, or leeway to interpret tasks themselves How to define and hand off feature specs
34. How to build 
 development process 3e
35. The goal The goal of any development process is to enable developers to write and deploy good code.
36. Therefore… If the process isn’t enabling developers to write and deploy good code, it’s not good process.
37. THE SUGGESTIONS: How to Build Development Process 3d • Protect fl ow state • Allow fewer interruptions • Hold fewer meetings • Empower devs to write and ship code • Work iteratively; ship early and often Build an environment conducive to coding
38. THE SUGGESTIONS: How to Build Development Process 3d • Speed up tests (less than a minute locally) • Upgrade dependencies • Speed up CI/CD (less than ten minutes) • Merge PRs quickly • Allocate time for code quality improvements (technical debt) Avoid death by 1,000 cuts
39. THE SUGGESTIONS: How to Build Development Process 3d • Watch out for Shiny Object Syndrome ™ • Your dev doesn’t know better than the framework • Beware the brilliant asshole • Code should not be a special snow fl ake Protect against devs’ bad habits
40. THE SUGGESTIONS: How to Build Development Process 3d • Automate code linting • Automate deploys and ensure they can run in less than 15 minutes • Trigger deploys by code merges • Deploy weekly, at least Simplify pushing to production
41. The summary 4
42. How do we build healthy and productive teams?
43. By working for it. It takes active, empathetic, informed, fl exible, communicative leadership to build a productive team of any size. There’s no magic bullet. It’s up to you.
44. Need help? tighten.com Want to learn more? mattstauffer.com/newsletter