Be collaborative
Last updated: 22 June 2023
Engineers should collaborate widely with other teams and professions, as well as closely with their immediate colleagues.
Rationale
Collaboration helps us to have a more joined up approach, to break down silos and build cross-functional relationships. It allows us to learn from each other rather than repeat each other’s mistakes.
Valuing diverse perspectives on problems leads to better thought out solutions - they work in more cases and cover more considerations - this improves quality, security and reliability. Close collaboration on immediate questions enables shorter feedback loops, quicker iteration and improved velocity of delivery.
Applications and Implications
- Work together closely in your team to iterate your design and code - pair programming can be good for this
- Use code reviews as an opportunity to transfer knowledge, build capability and strengthen solutions, not just as quality control
- Actively seek differing perspectives. Share ideas not only within your team or business area but with other professions too, for example with show and tells
- Choose communication channels that encourage your team to work together. This might be frequent ceremonies and sessions, or it might be asynchronous messages - everyone is different, try to find a balance that works best for your colleagues
- Create and take opportunities to work with other teams to build shared and reusable things when it would be beneficial to do so