Want to Build Better Software? Better Teams? Build Trust by Putting People (including yourself) at Ease.

Last night, at AgileKC, an agile software development professional group in Kansas City, our discussion began with writing the word 'trust' on the whiteboard. A couple of hours later, we had covered a lot of ground and one of our members finished at the board collaborating with the group to help him generate ideas for an upcoming column he's writing which will mostly focus on 'Agile Smells', identifying symptoms of and suggesting remedies for software development team and process issues. Not surprisingly, 'trust' was a recurring theme during that discussion as well.

We started AgileKC approximately one year ago and these meeting formats tend to be my personal favorites as the ideas and perspectives are openly shared and discussed and I always walk away with useful things to include in Visionpace agile pursuits. Next month we'll have a format where we'll meet in a private room at a local restaurant and sit around tables informally discussing a variety of topics and enjoy a meal in addition to hearing a more formal topic presented by a member of the group. In my experience attending professional meetings over the years this is by far the best format for maximizing learning and networking.

So back to 'trust'. I stumbled across a post on an XP list I'm on that referenced a video featuring Kent Beck discussing, 'Ease at Work' which among other things, related to the softer or more personal side of software development teams, including accountability, responsibility and of course, trust. I think there's a lot of valuable overlap with last night's discussion and as always, Kent shares a number of useful perspectives.

Here's a link to one review of the video on Reblog. You can view the video on Google Videos and YouTube.