Beautiful Teams

The Rubber Meets the Road

We decided to use our next team meeting to review the instrumentation and performance issues in the code. I played the role of scribe, since I didn't know enough about the code to usefully comment. In preparation for the meeting, I suggested the team consider reading the code out loud and that we plan to spend two hours on the review. I added a note at the bottom of the email: "Remember, don't tell anyone we're doing this long of a code review—Big Cheese will have my head." At the time I thought I was joking.

We slowed that code review down to a crawl. After two hours, we'd gone through 15 of the 30 pages. Fred had a number of ideas about how to re-instrument the code, but no ideas about how to work faster. We'd been at this for two hours and had no more mental energy.

"Let's stop this for today," I suggested.

"No, we can finish," Sam said.

Tim, a.k.a. "Silent Man," piped up. "Sam, no."

"No?"

"No way. We're tired. We've been focusing on this code and the instrumentation, and it's gotten us somewhere. But just spending more time right now isn't going to help. We need a little distance and a break. I need a bike ride."

"Look, Tim, I know you get all these great ideas on the bike, but—"

"No, I'm learning. So are you. JR, can you book us a room for 10 to 12 tomorrow? I think we can finish then. And if not, we'll figure out what to do next. Sam, listen to me. Go play with your dog or work out or take a shower or something. But do not look at this code anymore. Got it?" ...