We've all had that wonderful experience, at least once in our lives. It
might be a team at work, it might be a volunteer community, perhaps
it's an online forum. But it's as though someone cast a spell of "these
people work well together." Somehow, we find ourselves as part of a
group of people who care about one another, who understand what each
individual contributes to the effort, and who, somehow, manage to
extract the best from every contributor. When you look back, years
later, you think of it as a golden time.

Such magic is rare, but there are things you can do to encourage people
to evolve from "a random group of people whose major shared attribute
is the name on the paycheck" to a true _team_. Doing so is often
considered a managerial task -- i.e. hiring the right people in the
first place -- but it can come about from things that the team members
do themselves.

I'm working on my next article for Software Test & Performance Magazine
(stpmag.com) and my assignment, this time, is "best practices in team
management." I'd like to hear about some of the things you've done --
or seen done -- that helped make a team really work together. Sure,
tell me about really stupid things too, that destroyed a team's morale;
examples of what NOT to do are valuable as well. But mostly, I'd like
to hear what you think _works_. (If it's specific to QA, that's even
better... but I expect this is a generic issue.)

I'll start out with an example from my own past. Twenty years ago, I
was a contractor at Lotus Development when they ramped up a huge new
database product, code-named No Comment (it never DID ship, but that's
another story). The QA manager suddenly found herself with 25-30 people
who didn't know one another, who had no idea of each other's skills,
and weren't quite sure if this was the right project to be on. Sandra
didn't know the difference between a database and a pogo stick, but she
did one thing well: she turned us into a team.

Sandra got people to work together in small teams, she praised publicly
and often, and -- this sounds odd, but I think it was the most
successful thing -- she worked hard to establish a "theme" that
differentiated the "No Comment" QA team from everybody else. In our
case, it turned out to be a team affection for a particular noodle dish
from a Chinese restaurant in Cambridge.

It must have something to do with food, I think. Perhaps it's a
reflection of the human need to break bread with one another; many
issues are resolved when people take the time to eat and talk with one
another. The QA team working on 1-2-3 for the Mac, down the hall, had
their own coffee grinder and a French coffee press -- long before such
things were common -- and they were into popcorn in a big way. (They
were a team, too, even though the company decided to cut back
development and made some really stupid managerial decisions. The fact
that 1-2-3/Mac was lousy wasn't THEIR fault, I assure you.)

The result, at least for No Comment, was that everyone on the team
really cared about one another. More important for Lotus, though, was
that we each gave 100%. We were committed to making that app the best
it could possibly be, and we were relentless about demanding the most
from ourselves and from each other. What more could anyone ask?

Okay, your turn. What's worked for the teams YOU've been on, or which
you've led?

I have to hand in the article by October 15, so it'd be great it you
could reply -- privately, if that's more comfortable for you -- by the
10th. *Please* let me know how to refer to you in the article, too; the
usual format is "Esther Schindler, a QA tester at MyCompany in
Scottsdale, Arizona."

Esther Schindler
Contributing editor, Software Test & Performance