num_pages: 100
description: Why?Many software team leaders today face a weird problem: they believe in a bunch of great things that software developers should be doing but somehow cant seem to make this work at their own team.For example they feel that shorter iterations can be good for the team and customer but no one seems to believe them or no one cares when they mention it.They believe that unit testing can save the product from its poor quality but their team members would rather do anything but write those tests.Team leaders everywhere seem to be hitting a wall everywhere they try to make a difference  so they give up or they get things done half-way to the point of failure.People.Driving the new stuff into the team is usually the least of the worries of todays software team leaders. Team leads usually have little to no idea how to handle people related issues  issues that affect how the morale quality of work and overall performance of the team and of course impacts how easy or hard it is to implement the new stuff.Most team leaders are clueless as to how to handle their manager giving them an impossible due date a team member reluctant to try anything new or another team member teaching all the other members practices from 25 years ago that today only hurt the team.Why?No one teaches that to software team leads. Team leads today in the overwhelming majority of places are just developers who worked hard and stayed with the company long enough to be promoted. But they have no people or management skills - and those are very painfully needed when you are trying to drive the things you believe in inside an organization that has very little interest in changing.Team leadership is the next big thing that software developers need to conquer or none of this unit testing TDD Agile or Lean thing is going to catch on except in very small circles that by chance happen to have the right people leading their teams.
language: English
title: Notes to a software team leader
publisher: Roy Osherove