Team-Sized Projects

There are substantial differences between working alone and working on a team. You’ll want to make sure that candidates will be comfortable working on your code, and that you’ll be comfortable working on theirs.

• Have they worked on team projects? How big was the team? How big was the codebase?
• What was the division of labor? Did it change between releases? During the course of a single release?
• What tools did they use to help manage team-sized projects and codebases? Did they (personally) create any tools or processes to improve team efficiency or code quality?
• What bug/issue tracking systems have they used? Pluses and minuses?
• What revision control systems have they used? Positives and negatives? Do they have a religious objection to our choice of source code management? (Aside: using revision control even on solo projects is a great sign.)
• How will they feel about working with existing code? (You won’t get a real answer if you ask this outright. Try digging into past situations where they’ve inherited code and what that experience was like for them.)
• What tools and techniques did they use to assure quality? (Continuous integration? Code reviews? Debugging libraries? Etc.)
• Have they ever rewritten (refactored) a substantial portion of the code during a release/iteration (or over the course of multiple iterations)? What kind of planning went into that? How did it work out?

Next: Non-Technical Skills