Tuesday 28 July 2009

Working together - is it really that hard?

I got very frustrated today. Partially I suspect this is born out of the stupid hours I have been working for the last 6 months. I haven't had a single day off and I've had to work a lot of weekends too. That adds up and eventually I guess you reach breaking point. Today I did and I regret it.

Working in distributed teams is difficult. Especially if there is an element of distrust there. That's what we've got into here. One team is located in London, the other is offshore. We're in the first week of String test and we've already got an "it's a Build team issue" vs "no it's an Integration team issue" argument going. This is going to be a very difficult String test if this continues.

So what am I doing? I'm calling a meeting for tomorrow morning and I'm going to make it clear that this will not be acceptable, not from my team, nor from Build. There are no "Build issues", no "Integration issues", just String test issues and I expect both teams to work together to resolve them. It should not be this difficult to get two teams on the same project to work together to resolve something that makes both teams look bad.

What annoys me is that this is something that should not be an issue anymore. The people involved have all been on the project for over a year. Have we done such a poor job of offshoring our build team that they still feel outside of the project, or that once they throw the code over the fence that's it, job done? I hope not. I hope that this is a blip and that we'll get through this. Unfortunately I'm not overly optimistic.

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