We've all had that wonderful experience, at least once in our lives. It might be a team at work, it might be a volunteer community, perhaps it's an online forum. But it's as though someone cast a spell of "these people work well together." Somehow, we find ourselves as part of a group of people who care about one another, who understand what each individual contributes to the effort, and who, somehow, manage to extract the best from every contributor. When you look back, years later, you think of it as a golden time.

Such magic is rare, but there are things you can do to encourage people to evolve from "a random group of people whose major shared attribute is the name on the paycheck" to a true _team_. Doing so is often considered a managerial task -- i.e. hiring the right people in the first place -- but it can come about from things that the team members do themselves.

I'm working on my next article for Software Test & Performance Magazine (stpmag.com) and my assignment, this time, is "best practices in team management." I'd like to hear about some of the things you've done -- or seen done -- that helped make a team really work together. Sure, tell me about really stupid things too, that destroyed a team's morale; examples of what NOT to do are valuable as well. But mostly, I'd like to hear what you think _works_.

I'll start out with an example from my own past. Twenty years ago, I was a contractor at Lotus Development when they ramped up a huge new database product, code-named No Comment (it never DID ship, but that's another story). The QA manager suddenly found herself with 25-30 people who didn't know one another, who had no idea of each other's skills, and weren't quite sure if this was the right project to be on. Sandra didn't know the difference between a database and a pogo stick, but she did one thing well: she turned us into a team.

Sandra got people to work together in small teams, she praised publicly and often, and -- this sounds odd, but I think it was the most successful thing -- she worked hard to establish a "theme" that differentiated the "No Comment" QA team from everybody else. In our case, it turned out to be a team affection for a particular noodle dish from a Chinese restaurant in Cambridge.

It must have something to do with food, I think. Perhaps it's a reflection of the human need to break bread with one another; many issues are resolved when people take the time to eat and talk with one another. The QA team working on 1-2-3 for the Mac, down the hall, had their own coffee grinder and a French coffee press -- long before such things were common -- and they were into popcorn in a big way. (They were a team, too, even though the company decided to cut back development and made some really stupid managerial decisions. The fact that 1-2-3/Mac was lousy wasn't THEIR fault, I assure you.)

The result, at least for No Comment, was that everyone on the team really cared about one another. More important for Lotus, though, was that we each gave 100%. We were committed to making that app the best it could possibly be, and we were relentless about demanding the most from ourselves and from each other. What more could anyone ask?

Okay, your turn. What's worked for the teams YOU've been on, or which you've led?

I have to hand in the article by October 15, so it'd be great it you could reply -- privately, if that's more comfortable for you -- by the 10th. *Please* let me know how to refer to you in the article, too; the usual format is "Esther Schindler, a QA tester at MyCompany in Scottsdale, Arizona."

Esther Schindler
Contributing editor, Software Test & Performance