Expert DORA Tips; Predict Developer Attrition, Conditions for Great Teams, What Makes Team Topologies Humane?
Issue #23 Bytes
đą Dive into Learning-Rich Sundays with groCTO ⤾ď¸
đď¸Expert DORA tips from Continuous Delivery Author, Dave Farley
Continuous Delivery, Engineering metrics, TDD/DD & much more were covered in the latest session of âThe Hows & Whats of DORAâ powered by Typo. A power-packed session with 120+ engineers with Dave & Denis sharing insights from their 50+ years of engineering experience in building high-performance teams.
Check out the full recordingđ
Article of the Week â
âWhat stood out most to me were the findings that engineering managers and teams play a huge role ("people don't quit companies, they quit teams") and that leadership support didnât have as much of an impact on engagement as expected.â
Predicting Developer Attrition
A great engineering manager is able to nurture a team that delivers on time without losing people, while also training their team to self-manage or promote a replacement. A reasonable goal for companies like Google and Meta.
The recent study of over 13000 software engineers sprinkles extra nuance on the behavior components in terms of leadership support, organizational culture, and opportunities to learn with regards to engineersâ burnout, engagement, or intention to stay.
Editorâs noteâDo you actually read these papers or do you prefer the summary?
1. Leadership support reduces burnout
Leadership support is great to get a team back onto a healthy track. Empathy and ownership of past mistakes is what propels a great leader to help their team rest and reconnect.
2. Leadership supportâs impact low on engagement
On the other hand, leadership support does little to foster engagement, once the team is on a healthy baseline for intensity. This finding provides a new nuance to existing studies on cognitive load and psychological safety that helps contrast a high-performing team that is burnt out from a healthy team that is disengaged, potentially leading to attrition.
3. Culture influences burnout and engagement
Similar to the findings in the DORA Report 2023 and 2024, itâs clear the how your team members engage with each other directly correlates to lower burnout and higher levels of engagement when exposed to high standards and access to tooling.
4. Burnout prevention is a key strategy
Burnout prevention seems to be the winner on the ROI for leveraging leadership influence. Leading with empathy and a human connection that supersedes quarterly reviews is the key differentiator between organizations with low vs. high attrition (ie. developer wanting to leave, prior to even giving notice or ghosting).
5. Lack of learning opportunities top predictor of attrition
Your engineers will be tempted to leave your company for greener pastures when they stop learning. Opportunities given to your engineers for personal and professional growth are another easy way to keep them engaged, as long as they are at healthy level of intensity and not burning out.
Other highlights đ
Creating the Conditions for Great Teams to Form
Creating great work in a team is less about individual genius and more about setting the right conditions for collaboration. Daniel Walters shares his experience on what inhibits great teamwork and its core ingredients, based on his findings from SEEK Asia.
Inhibitors of Teamwork
Hand offs over collaboration. People who need to collaborate sitting far from each other or on different floors, sharing work with each other through permissive deliverables.
Disconnected work. Activities filtered down to individuals in accordance to their role and function also filter out the business impact and the impact on their peers, making work appear more activity-focused rather than maintaining the core story of the outcomeâs journey.
What makes teams great
Purpose. A shared north star sets the foundation for inspiration. Helps teams get out of their bubbles and silos and see the bigger picture.
Missions. A sustained area of focus. Not a team-for-coding-things, but rather teams forming around short and long initiatives connected with immediate customer needs to help foster a sense of meaning and urgency.
Tribes and bureaucracy. Bureacracy taking its name quite literally from functional departments being analogous to the drawers in a bureau. But communication is no longer purely physical. Tribes shape the digital identify of a group of people much more than a set of walls.
Customer Values. Most tasks worth investment to the customer requires a cross-functional team. Form teams to be skill-complete for a particular customer need or outcome and help the team members grow closer in trust.
Team Identify. Teams at SEEK Asia invest time into their names, their logo, decorations, team kits, hoodies to serve as a common brand for members to unite under, rather than just a form of identification on a spreadsheet.
The Teamâs Values. Despite whatâs written on the office wall, the teamâs values most commonly represent the strongest personalities within the team. Learn them and see how they complement each other.
Commitments. Adjustment to new teams takes time. Fresher teams give strong commitment to stay together even when faced with evolutions in mission.
Trust. Teams with high trust improve quickly.
Safety. Help teams discover what impacts feelings of safety within their ranks and foster a culture of familiarity and kindness.
What Makes Team Topologies Humane?
John Durrant shares his delight of attending the Fast Flow conference organised by the Team Topologies community in London.
Humane Collaboration:
Cognitive load reduction: Limits the complexity each team faces.
Autonomy: Teams are empowered to own their work and decision-making.
Clear communication pathways: Teams interact only when necessary, avoiding communication overhead.
Psychological safety: Reduced stress fosters better collaboration and innovation.
Team Topologies provide a kind of flow that does not require bureaucracy. It does this by shaping teams where members get moved to hotspots of communication density. Here, context is most accurate, allow for further reduction of hand offs and outside reporting. The challenges are enriching these hotspots with team identity and a shared mission without leaning in too much to disrupting frequently.
Tweet of the Week đť
I look back on my life, almost everything great that I managed to pull offâgreat by my own definition, not by the worldâs definitionâhas come from following my own natural intellectual obsessions. So I think if you can get obsessed over something, and if you can dive into it, just let yourself go and learn everything about it with no motivation other than just wanting to know the answer, that becomes the basis for all of the so-called âself-improvementâ out there.
Thatâs it for Today!
Whether youâre innovating on new projects, staying ahead of tech trends, or taking a strategic pause to recharge, may your day be as impactful and inspiring as your leadership.
See you next week(end), Ciao đ
Credits đ
Curators - Diligently curated by our community members Denis & Kovid
Writers of the week - Abi Noda, Daniel Walters, John Durrant
Sponsors - This newsletter is sponsored by Typo AI - Ship reliable software faster.
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