Rhythm

The local professional football team sucks this year. The quarterback remarked after a recent game that the team lacked rhythm. The hosts on the radio yesterday were discussing this quote and said something along the lines of rhythm is not something you can draw on a clipboard or practice, but it is obvious when the team is lacking it.

It is not uncommon to hear the term ‘rhythm’ applied to practicing TDD. I’m really bad at TDD, but I know enough to completely understand the applicability.

I think development teams can also get into rhythms. This is one of the reasons why Scrum meetings are held at the same time each day for instance; to try and develop a rhythm to the day. Committing code often, deploying frequently (internally or externally) are all part of a modern, healthy development rhythm.

As organizations grow, they start to develop their own inertia against this rhythm with meetings about meetings, fiefdoms, external agendas, etc.. The role of the team lead (or Scrum Master if you are in that context) is then to protect the team’s rhythm. I keep thinking back to Mitch Lacey’s Agile 2009 talk about how his team’s rhythm was under attack from within and he took on someone higher in the chain to resolve it for the better of the team.

Right now I can’t help but think our team was finally starting to approach a healthy, sustainable rhythm, but in the last couple days it looks like we’re about to get tackled off that rhythm Real Soon Now. Hopefully we aren’t on the ground sucking wind for too long.

At least we have been forewarned.