Team tourism is a process of visiting a team to “make” notes.
Comments from Kevin Trethewey on Team Tourism####
Some meta-things I have learned in the process, off the top of my head:
- I haven’t personally found any value in trying to benchmark teams against each other, the variability is just too high between them.
- A lot of the system that a team is in is not observable, so you have to be careful not to make inferences (confirmation bias)
- Some cultures are more open than others
- People learn best from people who are doing similar work to them.
- If you speak to a manager you will get a manager view of the system.
- If you speak to a dev you will get a dev view.
- The difference between a dev and manager view of the system is interesting on it’s own and it takes some maturity to sift that.
- There is a lot of value in just knowing that people in different systems have the same problems as you do.
Mechanisms we have tried:
- Whiteboard each other’s process and discuss
- Get people to facilitate each other’s retrospective. (this of course assumes a retro is in place on both sides)
- Observe a specific session (planning/demo etc), and give feedback on observations afterwards
- Spend a day with the team
