"It's a funny old game."

This is a phrase that was immortalised many years ago into the educated soccer commentators punditry. To this day it is associated with the footballing legend Jimmy Greaves. He however denies that he has ever muttered these hallowed words, but I clearly recollect him talking to Ian St John on the Saint and Greavsie Show on numerous occasions. But if the man himself denies it then I guess I must be mistaken.

The ‘Saint and Greavsie show’ was a Saturday morning football preview show with a combination of the video highlights from the previous weeks games, interviews, opinion and a review of the upcoming games on the Saturday. With the advent of Sky and the commercialisation of the beautiful game, this show would now be a review of the upcoming games on the Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

I have been working in the software development business for far too long. My roles have ranged from day to day software developer, those with project and team management responsibilities to my current position of technology advocate for the CA 2E and CA Plex toolsets, specialising in enablement and best user practices in enterprise sized software development environments.

I often use analogies referring back to football to simplify describing issues or ideas to members of my teams, in fact, I find it rather amusing to compare football management to software development practices and the careful balancing act of creating high productivity software development teams.

My thoughts thus far are that the art of football management and that of software development team management have numerous parallels. I would historically refer to the construction industry or the car manufacturing industry to derive a comparison for the creation of the software product itself. But, when shaping your team it is quite clear that you require a myriad of skills, approaches, characters, opinions, ego’s, attitudes to name just a few of the attributes required to form a modern day software development team.

You will need to give careful consideration to your preferred team formation, management and coaching staff, youth development plans, team captaincy selection, picking the players for a particular project, substitutions, dealing with injuries to the squad, career mentoring as well as dabbling in the transfer market. The prospective number of parallels appears almost infinite.

So where do you possibly start?

I guess you have to look at yourself (The Manager) and decide on your style and approach. Are you going to be a hands on tree hugger or a hardnosed disciplinarian. i.e. A Steve McClaren or a Fabio Capello!

You then need to employ your trusted backroom staff (coaches and medical team). It is highly possible that as a manager you were also a former player and you probably still retain most of the skills required to perform many of the roles within your team, but be warned, if you do find yourself doing rather than managing then this is a sign that you have the incorrect balance in your team.

A manager that believes he can do every role within the team and often gets sucked into the detailed coding on the teams projects is guaranteed to be holding back the team come match day. He needs to empower his team with clear instructions and tactics in order to navigate the perils of developing quality software systems. His role should be to conduct the performance of the team from the broader viewpoint on the sidelines.

Your coaches are your technology evangelists. Their role is to ensure that the team fully understands industry best practices for your technology implementation and they are responsible for the day-to-day training and fitness of the players. These guys educate the players and control items like development standards and peer review processes. They play a pivotal role within the team to provide feedback about a player’s progress and readiness. The medical team are your DBA’s, they ensure that your players are in peak physical condition and provide ideas for improving performance and integrity of the team and products.

With the manager and backroom staff in situ along with the assumption that you have finalised team tactics and on field communication strategies, it is now time to concentrate on the squad.

The types of players that you have are critically important. It is imperative that the right mixture of roles and personalities are employed. It is no good having an entire squad made up of day coders or similarly overloading the human resources entirely out of super-coders and architecture astronauts. (Thanks Joel for that gem)

Great football teams have a mixture of leaders, defenders and all-rounders, as well as, specialist roles like striker or winger. These roles will have varying objectives and performance targets and are likely to be rewarded with differing pay levels. Generally, a striker will command a higher salary than a goalkeeper or a defender, they will also be motivated with bonuses linked to the number of goals that they score during a season.

Age is also important. Consider a team of 17 year old apprentices playing against a group of wiley old professionals with all the life experience caps that they have attained. Balance is a key element of this article and age along with the relevant fitness, naivety, passion, rawness and nerve is equally as important as any other attributes that make a strong team. Historically and with the only exception in soccer being the Busby Babes. Succesful sporting teams in general would have a mixture of ages.

All members of the team will have their objectives set at the start of the season and reiterated before each game. In fact the Post Implementation Review after the game will significantly affect the managers decision making for future games.

The yearly budget you have available will determine the number of star players that you can afford to employ. Just like when creating a fantasy football team online you will need to ensure that your team performs as a whole and doesn’t rely on a few heroes to score you those all important fantasy points. It is the same for a software development team. You can’t rely on a couple of heroes to do all the hard graft whilst the rest of the team sits back and watches. It is proven that heroes do not scale.

The type of project is also an important factor. The race for the league title could be considered a release of the software. Meticulous planning is paramount and this generally represents the highest team priority for the season. A cup competition could be described as PTF or service pack and generally has less lead time and the items of work are more random in scope and type. Emergency patches, I guess, would be extra time in a knockout match that has been tied after the first ninety minutes or the all important penalty shootout that the English always seem to lose.

Now that you have assembled your squad and understand the scope of your requirements you need to consider the team formation. Do you go for an attacking formation and line up for a project or a defensive approach? You can certainly draw from experience with similar projects and previous games against the same opposition. Do you go for an industry standard 4-4-2 formation or an attacking 4-3-3 with more focus of scoring goals with the risk that you may concede more.

So what roles do your players perform for your development team? Do you have a team of permanent players or do you have some on loan (contractors). You then have formation and player positional issues to consider.

Your goalkeeper is your gatekeeper. Their sole focus is to ensure that no errors make it into the production software. They perform the system regression testing.

Your defenders are your process converts and quality conscious developers, their stalwart approach ensures your projects have fewer bugs. These players traditionally lack flair and innovation and the technical ability to complete the highly intricate activities so should be avoided for high pressure or groundbreaking assignments. They are however, tenacious and determined and just as important to the overall performance of the team as any other team member. The defenders love solving configuration issues and enjoy debugging other developers code. They are advocates of unit testing processes and even talk to the testing team. There are of course exceptions to this sterotype, especailly in the modern game where the technical ability of players has been improved from the days of Chopper Harris.

Midfielders are much harder to quantify. They are generally the fitter members of your team and have the ability to perform many roles throughout the team. Some are specialist defensive minded players who protect the defenders with the extra level of security. They enjoy performing peer reviews.

Every team needs a playmaker. This is the person who enjoys having extra time on the ball and loves playing that killer pass to open up the projects defence. They are dead ball specialists and keen reference book readers.

Your wide players have speedy boots and code at a frenetic pace. They can sometimes trip up and get caught out of position but the times when they do get beyond the defence to create opportunities for the strikers can be crucial for a project that is running behind schedule. The amount of running they do during a project often ensures that they need to be substituted during a game.

The striker’s job is to produce the goals. They like to code all the sexy aspects of the deliverable. They tend to prefer GUI development to batch processing and they definitely pay lip service to the art of unit testing. They are generally calmer under pressure and have sublime belief in their own abilities which can lead to a sense of laziness as they tackle most projects with aplomb.

You also need to consider the preferred kicking foot or development skill. There are positions like wing back or winger where delivery is paramount. Having a rightfooter playing on the left or a leftfooter on the right has both good and not so good options. Again, with the modern game this is being phased out by two-footed players who have been nurtured since birth. But if you do have a one trick pony in your team then you need to consider their involvement carefully.

Getting the balance of your team right is important. Too many strikers and you will fail with every project as no-one wants to do the grunt work. Too many defenders and your project timelines will consistently slip. Every team needs to be carefully balanced, coached and briefed on the preferred ways of working.

It is a shame that so many managers just don’t understand the dynamics of a highly productive software development team. Perhaps we need to ensure that software development managers obtain their coaching badges and have performed at a professional level before progressing into the management arena, after all........

It’s a funny old game".

Thanks for reading.
Lee.