Years of working with and for developers and architects gave me the idea to collect tips from the road, tips of how to lead a group of developers working on a project. This post is list of those tips, hopefully I’m not wrong in all of them and better yet, helps somebody on finishing a project. Please share your tips as well.

•Do not reinvent the wheel.

•Always cheaper to buy other Enterprise solutions for common development blocks.

•When putting a solutions together research all third party out there.

•It shall be only one architect

•Keep development team small. More than 5 developers will slow down a project

•You are as fast as the slowest developer.

•Divide tasks in small workable items and give them to tasks owners.

•Does not matter how good a developer is, if questions all decisions, you should remove him from the project.

•You cannot select your developers?

●Compromising takes too long.

●Managing difficult people is too expensive.

•No, you are not the problem, is your vision and you are the architect

•Listen, yet when in doubt; go with your vision, not with the developers vision.

•Don’t compromise performance with time.

•Play the corporate game, yet don’t side track.

•Friday is never a good day for a release.

•Never blame a developer working in the project unless you wanted him out.

•When the project is release and successful, credit only the developers.

•If the project is unsuccessful, blame only yourself.

I wish you an smooth and successful project.

Cheers

Al