Photo by Ian Schneider

I always love my parents' job, I grew up in a family of two teachers, later my dad became a school principal. They were sharing every day their experiences, funny situations with students, and emotions. In addition to all this information about teaching, I retain one thing that I feel it

Teaching others is such a satisfying feeling, especially if you can observe their progression along the time

these concepts were carved in my subconscious mind since then. I remember in mid-high school I went to ask about a course in a private school, After introducing my self the principal proposed to me teaching Adobe Photoshop and web concepts, Without diving into the details of this journey, I do appreciate it.

Time passes and I find myself several times in the shoes of a teacher, the story I share in the next paragraph is quite different from teaching, but has many similarities I wanted to write down.

Mentoring someone, who decided?

In a company, this approach may be part of its culture, So the HR team once they hire a new joiner, they ask a senior who wants to play the role of mentor, certainly this is a voluntary decision and not a hierarchical one, as mentoring requires first of all the initiative and passion to do it. This is not a work task to complete, this is a mindset to share with love.

Regardless of having this culture or not, in many cases, a spontaneous relationship between a senior and a new team -member took place, mainly due to their personalities rapprochement. Then we begin to talk about mentoring as the senior introduces his new team-mate to other teams, lets him discover departments, work methods, and any knowledge that may help him be well integrated.

What should we have to succeed in a mentoring program?

In my opinion, we need to behave like coach and trainee, or like teacher and student. As a mentor, Having this passion for knowledge sharing, feeling so satisfied while seeing others growing up, Being generous when it comes to advising and guiding are all "must-have" values we believe in. Regarding skills, we need to be good in communication, the capacity of thought, and patience.

On the other side, the trainee needs some skills, or call them behaviors like being good listener, a hungry man who wants to enrich his knowledge by asking for details, but certainly without disturbing the mentor, Because this one is meanwhile an employee with tasks and missions to complete, So as a trainee we keep calm and patient when we don't have some information or answers immediately. For the trainee the mentoring should represent an opportunity to know more, have different points of view, but in any case should impact our analysis capabilities, and influence our decision-making, we have to protect our autonomous which is the most valuable goal we target.

Day 1

I've been delighted to welcome with my team our new colleague who has just graduated and he is today starting his first job as a software engineer. I took him for a short tour to discover the office, the facilities, and our beautiful kitchen corner where often we share coffee time. I think the first impression is very important the reason why my team and I gave it all our intention to make it at the same time funny and useful for our team-mate. We wanted to help him feel very comfortable. For today apart from receiving his laptop and tools no code or pull request.

Day 2

A short introduction to explain the project views, our work methods, and collaboration best practices we believe in within our entity. As a software engineer focusing on technical staff, I suggested putting our junior colleague in touch with our scrum master for the purpose to learn about agility, how we use SCRUM as a reference with all its rituals from daily stand up to sprint retrospective.

Now it's coffee time, a good moment to show him an important value within our company, generosity especially when it comes to knowledge, we believe that sharing is such a powerful value that helps all of up to grow up together and progress whatever our field of expertise. Although everyone has a clear and well-defined role within the team, being aware of what others are doing is crucial cope with any absence or unavailability.

Day 3

Our new colleague is very motivated and curious, his questions are dept and constructive, but unfortunately, I could not answer all of them immediately, I let him know that he can also email me and I'll answer him later once I finish a prioritized task. The lesson here is very simple, a question may be answered later but should never end up without any response. To avoid any confusion or lack of trust that may affect my relationship with my junior colleague.

Day 4

Collaboration over delegation is what happens when we have less time to explain or teach someone else how to complete a task or do a job, but this approach is too bad. As a mentor, I prefer to collaborate with trainees walking together side by side armed with passion and patience with one goal: helping him being autonomous instead of completing tasks for him quickly no matter how much time will take, training others is always a pleasure and a must-have for a mentor. A mentor should walk side by side with a trainee helping being autonomous instead of completing tasks for him quickly

A mentor should walk side by side with a trainee helping being autonomous instead of completing tasks for him quickly

Day 5

Are you a good listener? I was convinced as a mentor I need to listen a lot to my trainee, give him all the time to explain his point of view or vision even though I'm not okay with or I'm not sure he is not on the right way, keep calm and let him finish, I see many colleagues when a junior comes with a new idea, or an initiative, they quickly try to crop believing that is it a wast time, Unfortunately, this behavior may dramatically degrade a junior’s self-confidence and his motivation for future initiatives.

Next Day

The days go by one after the other and I’m getting so happy to see our team growing up and how our new junior colleague is taking over subjects and becoming autonomous, This trusted and honest relationship we built together is bringing what is expected to be. I do believe that mentoring someone else is nothing other than giving him the right and the necessary tools to dive alone with confidence into any subject. This friendly relationship helps us learn from each other, I do appreciate supporting my colleague during his first days within our team and in the company. His questions, exchanges, and remarks let me learn how to communicate and explain my ideas and point of view at a low level using simple and easy expressions to understand when talking to a debutant person or someone outside of my field of expertise.

It's been a constructive journey

Along the way, I learned a lot of things and values I would like to summarize below:

• Stay humble when you talk to junior or debutant people.
• There is always something to learn from others whatever their expertise level.
• Share and publish your knowledge to help serve and improve yourself and others.
• Gain respect and recognition

publish, share, exchange to help serve, shape and improve the world

During the latest months, I’ve been asked to move from a small agile team to a large one, why? what changes should I cope with? what obstacles to tackle and what kind of achievements we accomplished? here are the experience story and the learned lessons

Small Agile team​

I've been part of a small agile team of 4 developers, tech-lead, UX designer, Scrum master and a Product owner. Working with scrum method, I do believe that this team size was just perfect as the communication is too smoothly and decision making is quick and effective. We developers were using the git flow branching strategy. A new branch is created for each user story, commit added, pull request created and reviewed then merged into the master. Product owner manage easily his backlog. The scrum master scheduled perfectly our scrum sessions and these one were gainful in term of business understanding and story telling. Thanks to the great work of our UX/UI design integrating the UI and implementing the user experience is definitely optimal thanks to sketch software.

The team size was a key element to a successful journey, providing a great added value at the end of each sprint while delivering high-quality software with security standards-compliant.

Communication and collaboration

When is come to working together and collaborating with a team, communication is a key factor toward success. While this is easy for a small team as we are often setting around the same table or in the same open space we communicate orally and directly trying always to avoid emails and chat as much as we can, but for sure without omitting to give each one its private space and time to concentrate on his tasks with no disturbs. In the other hand and once the team getting larger we first obstacles we start to face is how to communicate and exchange, even harder for taking a decision. Another point is managing meetings which means to manege finding rooms especially as we are working in a co-working building then as we have to take into consideration each one is calendar. Now we are in the meeting room with more than 12 team-mates it took longer than expected, deviation and rarely we end up with a defined actions list assigned people.

I believe either we are a small or a large team there are the right tools and ways to communicate, We need just to avoid applying the ones that work fine for a small team in the context of a large team and vice versa.

Support and expertise

One of the greatest points when you are part of a small team, is that you know each member is scope of expertise which is very useful and effective when it comes to coordinate whether to change a piece of code, to integrate a new technology or document a feature. Unfortunately this advantage disappears along the way a team begins to extend and we start to be distributed which affects our knowledge about expertise mapping in the project and for sure consume more time to find the right source to support you.

I refer to Conway's law stating about organization structure footprint on their production:

Organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the comminication structures of these organizations. "Melvin Conway"

In our organization we understood this quickly and thanks to our agile coach we reorganize our teams and introduced some practices to continue delivering added value feature continuously.

Single Point of Knowledge​

As our team begin to grow and having many members than needed in an agile model, I observed in the lake of coordination, close collaboration, and effective communication, new single points of knowledge taking place in our organization as some people with or without attention monopolize and hold in their corner some specific knowledge or expertise which impacts the pace of productivity, innovation, and rotation. Contrarily to the case of a small team where the knowledge and responsibilities are well shared and all members have almost the same level of knowledge about the project which avoids the 'indispensable member' obstacle and lead to transparent and rapid rotation and delivery.

Team representative and interface​

When I was part of a small team there was a member who keeps the team informed, knows the organization’s culture, and promotes best practices that make our entity inspiring. Often this role appears naturally cause the person playing it holds some qualities that help him representing the team, interfacing with management contrarily in the context of the old school team, a project manager take this responsibility. But can we have many representatives (Leaders) in the team? In my point of view, YES as each member has a different style therefore we can boost the team’s productivity and creativity. Shared leadership led also to reduce responsibilities stress, thrive solidarity. For the company we observed many advantages once we made the move to this model:

• Share the the bigger picture with everyone.
• give the company more options.
• increase in decision making transparency.

Finally, the question is can this model succeed with a large team? From my experience, this can be a huge challenge for the management but also for immature teams who can considerably slow down the decision making.

I’ve been part of different teams small and large and I believe that adopting the right management style and establishing a transparent and honest relationship whether between team members or between teams and the management should always gain the upper hand.

Being the representative of your team is talking about your shared values and practices, defending your team's decisions and choices. But in any case shouldn't be a position that we take over.

It's sound strange at first, difficult to manage, and certainly understanding the reasons behind and how can we take advantage of this practice introduced a couple of years ago.

Mob programming is an approach introduced to the agile world in the purpose of helping the teams establish a common development mindset, sharing the same principles to design and code.

A few months ago my team and I started a new project aiming at providing a digital platform for developers to help them accelerate their time to market. The platform offers a multiple
services such as creating web application scaffold, source code repositories, build pipeline with all high-quality stages like security check, team management and deployment environment.

Obviously the project size is enormous and requires a high quality architecture design, distributed systems best practices and synchronous coding styles so during the scoping and framing phases we decided to adopt the mob programming approach to share and communicate architecture decisions, lean our performances with the goal to promote our autonomy when it comes to developing user stories independently or separately.

our mob programming sessions are scheduled for the whole workday for 4 weeks consecutive, we team up in the same room having only one keyboard and one big screen. Each developer takes control of the keyboard and code for 10 minutes. I believe that respecting the mob programming rules is a key to success in this experience which is full of learning for developers but also for the quality of the product as we build together the skeleton.

I would like to share with you all the rules we followed during our sessions:

• having a comfortable and spacious room with all the necessary tools like big screen and a mechanic keyboard ✌
• defining roles before each session, we've had the Driver who types in code and Navigator who discuss the idea and guide the Driver.
• respecting timing is a key, it's better to hand the keyboard over with a broken test than overtaking.
• we've been driven by basic user stories at the beginning in order to focus on technical architecture.
• we discuss, debate and argue our ideas when we think they are right, no one or idea should be discarded.
• Believing that there no strict model or perfect one to follow, a retrospective is held weekly to evaluate our mob programming enrollment.

Before experiencing the mob programming I was asking my self how can will be productive by letting 8 developers to work on the same thing for weeks, I confess how was am I surprised by what we were able to deliver, a full feature bringing a real added value to our customers. If you ask me for the secret the only answer I have is we were doing the work the most perfect way it could, avoiding broking the build, hard merges, and enduring exchanges by emails or pull requests to agree on a design, interoperability, components communication, and best practice adoption. In addition discussing ideas and approaches helped us a lot to select the best ones.

During these sessions, we build a wonderful team spirit, communication protocols, and a homogeneous mindset. without omitting the impact on our motivation and commitment. I was really happy with this journey and the results harvested at the end.

I highly recommend giving this approach a try even though for a short time, I consider practicing is the best way to understand, evaluate and conclude if it could bring the right expectations for your team.