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# System prepended metadata

title: Dev Lead Overview
tags: [' people', management]

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---
tags: management, people
---
Dev Lead Overview
===

### Promote good culture
- Interteam communication
- Develop responsibility of getting tasks from dev to production
- Don't blame people for "bad code" or "wrong approaches"
- We can always do better
- "That's how we've always done it" is not good enough

### Delegate and share responsibility
- You won't get the work done your team members will
- Ensure engagement of developers in a task from planning to production
- Find people to help you take care of infrastructure that your team owns
  - Jenkins
  - AWS
  - Build scripts
    - Webpack
    - Jenkinsfile

### Individuals
- Look for people who are bored
  - Why are they bored?
  - Ask them what they want to do about it?
  - Make suggestions based on the individual developer's feedback
- Look for people who are struggling
  - Is it due to tooling?
  - Is it due to process?
  - Is it due to interactions with others?
    - Internal to team
    - External to team
- Solicit feedback on how you are supporting them
  - Don't assume you know what people are thinking
  - Don't assume you know what people need
- Empathise
  - People don't do bad things because they want to be bad
  - Are they going through something in their personal lives?
- Is someone fit for their role?
  - Has the way the team works evolved in a way that they no longer have the skills to share developer responsibilities?

### Track work and progress
- How many things is an individual developer responsible for?
  - Are they taking on too much
  - Are too many things **In Progress**

### Promote good practice and quality
- There should be enough time to provide good test coverage
- What is good test coverage?
- Write code for readability
- Be conscious of introducing complexity
- Modular code is more maintainable and/or easier to replace
- Look after your team
- Everyone's success and failure are your own
- Making mistakes is ok
- Get better awareness of things by doing good logging and monitoring in production

### Encourage involvement in strategic initiatives
- Think about how we will code, build, test and deploy in the future
  - What could be improved with current code, build, test and deploy
- Manage versions of any libraries and frameworks we are dependant on

### Monitor 
- Gain awareness of things:
  - Technical debt
    - Document it
    - Plan to deal with it
    - "Pay for it now or pay for it later"
- Do some testing in production
  - Manual
  - Automated
- Log things
  - Just do it!

### Processes
- Monitor processes
  - What works
  - What is a pain point
- Change processes
  - Don't be afraid to try something new to improve processes that are painpoints
  - Look at dropping processes that are causing:
    - Time wastage
    - Developer frustration

### Technology
- Know all the technology that your team relies on
- Understand historical decisions around what technology your team are using
- What technology is holding back the team?
- What technology is enabling the team?

### Represent your team
- Don't hide how you team feels, tell someone:
  - Your manager
  - Leadership team
  - People you deal with in other teams
- Monitor things that negatively effect your team
- Monitor things that positively effect your team
- Promote things that you've documented that are:
  - Positive
  - Negative