To end the day, I attended Decision Making in Software Teams by tlberglund for the sole reason that I’m alway seeking to improve descision making in self led teams. It just started, but with some quotes from Alister Cockburn and Mary Poppendieck (as well as a reference to “Implementing lean Software Development”) I know it’s going to be good.
Tim presented several patterns and anti-patterns that effect decision making as well as how decision making is affected by a wide array of psychological and social norms.For instance, at the individual level just the way you frame an issue to a decision maker has a HUGE impact on how they perceive and act on the information. There were a lot of forces that influence decision making at the individual level that add up when applied to the team level.
The biggest take way for me was that on any team you should encourage conflict. This is something I have always thought makes a healthy team. I’ve often found that teams I’ve been on that aren’t afraid of conflict and confronting conflict seem to best resolve issues and make the best decisions. Teams that do avoid them are often facing all kinds of dysfunctions.
Moving from this, Tim also mentioned that is really important that each member of team feels safe to disagree. If they feel they’ll be punished for disagreeing they’ll always cave in to group think and avoid any perceived conflict that might be cause by disagreeing.
A very interesting idea he proposed when you do have fault lines within a team is to have people on opposite sides of the fault line make the case for the other side’s cause. This is something I’d like to investigate further.
This was the first time I got to see Tim present and thought he did a great job and although a lot of the things he talked about I’ve read or heard at other conferences, there were a few new things I learned about as well.
I think tomorrow I’m going to satisfy my appetite for more technically oriented sessions. iBeans, Scala, and Google App Engine. And remember, if you see me around I’m more than up for pairing in on a code kata. 
