Remote working and asynchonous collaboration exploded during the pandemic, but, even as we start to return to normal, it’s clear that it only accelerated a trend that was inevitable anyway. So how can we improve upon the effectiveness of engineering teams working remotely? In this session, Jessica Cregg explores how we can better organize how remote teams work and collaborate by taking lessons from video games.

Gaming the System

How video games can help us create more effective virtual teams

Orders of magnitude matter. Things don’t go up by order of one every time. Organizing people in a group requires disseminating information and its interpretation and, most importantly, its distribution. Remote working and asynchronous collaboration have become the norm, meaning that distributed teams have taken their silos of knowledge with them. The impact of this has compounded any organizations experiencing a skills gap with a skills distribution problem, increasing the importance of good documentation and transparent interaction processes.

The State of DevOps report launched earlier this year found that the best performing teams don’t just work to collaborate but also define the types and order of interactions. In this session, we’ll go over the fundamentals of requirements for engineering, looking at how orders of magnitude scale alongside the expansion of scope and additional requirements.

Designing our workflows in line with the teams that we currently work with rather than remaining in a constant state of flux can enable us to better define our interactions, lower the stakes of our deployments and most importantly, redefine the way we look at something being ‘finished’. By adopting the principles of a platform-based consumption model, we can push on towards not only being better but, more importantly, both knowing and doing better.