Many developers favor the challenging dev tasks and tend to dive themselves into the technical details. They are more
interested in winning the arguments, especially technical arguments, unwillingness to sit quietly to hear points from the
other sides of the table. In a conference, we often see conversation is fraught with radical opinions and personal attacks,
members fight for control and discourage other guys from speaking, if any other stated different viewpoints, they will reach
out to find fault, rather than be engaged in finding a variety of possibilities.
As a result, we always see members deadlocked in an issue, without making any progress, and nobody knows what is really going
on in the decision. In this case, managers must try hard to explicitly guide them to resolve the conflict and leads to a
better team decision-making, as conflict management is always a necessary skill managers need to have.
Arguments often provoked are on following things:
1) Frameworks choosing, such as EJB vs. spring, struts2 vs. Tapestry, Hibernate vs. Ibatis, JDBC, Prototype vs. JQuery,
etc.
2) The style and layout of website main pages.
Once a ecommerce application was delayed to go live for two month because of the bosses quarreling about main page's
style without a final decision.
3) The standards of technologies, coding convention, SE process, documentation format, employee performance assessing.
Many project managers waste a lot of valuable time on discussing those regulations without a collaborative team
building.
4) Business logic requirements with different understandings and interpretations.
Sometimes, the whole dev team was trapped into these problems and never moves forward a step until those problems are
clarified.
5) Other frequent and yet inefficient technical arguments in your team.
Things go worse when the project manager fails to resist the very dangerous temptations and plunges straight into the detail
problems. Consequently, he buries himself into that technical challenge and after that nothing can draw her attention back to
the project critical path. When you are with a tree, you will lose the sight of the forest and forget about the other
obligations you have.
We always say every road leads to Rome. As most IT projects are time-critical, sometimes you should make things happen at
first rather than meeting by meeting without a decision-making.
As a project team or member, our goals are not to pursuit perfect techniques, we are missioned to build a working solution or
deliver working software to our clients. There is only one Microsoft, we could not afford like Microsoft to develop an OS
software such as Vista after a four years development lifecycle.