Ask HN: How to manage developer relations across embedded specialist teams?

1 points by firstbabylonian 9y ago ↗ HN

The company I work for has offices around the world, and most of those host fairly isolated teams that don't really need to collaborate or communicate daily.

However, I'm part of a specialist (mobile) team, and we strive to maintain close contact with other mobile teams embedded in other parts of the company.

Specifically, we want to promote healthy developer relations, where the "wider" mobile team is aware of all architectural decisions made on different mobile projects, all members actively review each other's code, maintain shared libraries, etc.

While standard distributed team management challenges apply here (timezones, Slack etiquette, not knowing people "in person"), I'm interested in how to manage this on a more personal level. What are the key components of creating solidarity across all specialist developers, when they may work on different projects and thus "belong" to different local teams?

1 comment

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jerdog 9y ago ↗

Having done this in the past, what worked for us was Slack communication along with quick, bi-weekly calls to just catch everyone up. These calls were absolutely no longer than 15 minutes, and served the purpose well. Reviewing of code was essential through CI/CD that Gitlab offers, and we kept a repository/wiki of all shared libraries and such so that everyone knew where things were.