Over the last few weeks, my team has spent time refocusing on communication within the team as well as with our customer proxy. For various reasons, we had become a very siloed. There was little communication with our customer and only little more communication between team members–primarily among individuals that had to make their pieces of code talk to each other.

We’ve gone back to tasking out work on a regular basis. In the course of doing this, we all are talking about what’s there, what’s needed, what we understand, what we don’t understand. With this, we were able to figure out what we could comfortably commit to. Then, we worked with our customer proxy while we developed. This was done in conjunction with our normal code review/refactoring sessions. Lo and behold, the iteration went smoothly.

I hope the rest of the team feels the same way. I know from a lead/senior development perspective, it was less painful (almost fun!) than previous iterations. I’d almost forgot what a little communication can do.