My team is full of seniors and we have the same problem. I think there are ways we can come together as a team, but when the team formed we instantly had several huge projects dropped in our lap, and everyone had to keep supporting products from their previous team. This meant we never had a chance to sit down and figure out how we work. Where should code and documentation live? What do code reviews look like? What skills do we have within the team? What do meetings look like? How do we accept new work? How do we get feedback internally? How do we identify and raise awareness of issues holding us up? What operational tasks do we need to be aware of and how to we make sure they are getting done? What is the support model for the things we build?What happens when someone goes on vacation?
Because we were all seniors, the people running the team assumed this would all just magically happen, despite our insistence that these were topics we needed to talk about and decide as a team if we were going to work together effectively. We are several years into the team and it’s still a mess of mostly lone coders doing their own things, with the occasionally small sub-group collaborating on a project. I’ve almost given up and am just waiting for the next re-org so we can try again. I’ve told our scrum master we need a retrospective at the end of our sprints at least 20 times. We haven’t had a single one, I don’t think he knows what it is. I’ve been trying really hard not to do his job for him, but it’s hard holding back the urge to Nick Burns him.
Because we were all seniors, the people running the team assumed this would all just magically happen, despite our insistence that these were topics we needed to talk about and decide as a team if we were going to work together effectively. We are several years into the team and it’s still a mess of mostly lone coders doing their own things, with the occasionally small sub-group collaborating on a project. I’ve almost given up and am just waiting for the next re-org so we can try again. I’ve told our scrum master we need a retrospective at the end of our sprints at least 20 times. We haven’t had a single one, I don’t think he knows what it is. I’ve been trying really hard not to do his job for him, but it’s hard holding back the urge to Nick Burns him.