Jim Mc Carthy

Jim, AreYouThere? last edit 11/2000 -- 12/2004

Hello. Don't know exactly who all I am addressing, as far as I am concerned, all are welcome. I think we may have some contributions that will be of interest.

My wife and I have been operating a special teamwork lab-cum-course, called software development bootcamp, since leaving microsoft in 1996. In the context of our lab (a recurrent 5 day and night software development cycle simulation with a fresh team), we have been collecting/creating successful patterns, antipatterns, interpersonal protocols, and establishing related definitions (which we call #defines).

This work has been a substantial undertaking, involving as many as a thousand or so software developers, from all over the world, consuming substantially all of our resources and personal focus, and it has yielded many interesting new ideas and team practices. the bundling up of our findings has resulted in a product we are calling TheCore, which is a compendium of what we believe to be the necessary set of conceptual tools and encoded behaviors to launch pretty much any group of collaborators into a hyper-productivity mode (such a team we refer to as a booted team). In all, some 30 or 40 patterns, 10 or 12 protocols, dozens of defines and a dozen or so antipatterns (having actually counted things up yet!). TheCore will be described in a series of books, likely accompanied with CDs. The first volume of this effort will be published in the next several months by Addison Wesley Longman (AWL). We will be providing the completed book manuscript to AWL on this product on Dec 27, 2000.

TheCore itself is nearing its version 1.0 release as a piece of "human loadable" software. TheCore is intended to be used by teams (teams of all stripes, but with a bias toward those creating intellectual property, especially high-tech), teams who desire to achieve the highest possible result-to-effort ratio for themselves, and who are willing to engage with each other at substantially higher levels of collaborative intimacy than is typical.

Background on how TheCore was developed can be found at http://www.teamworx.com/devxpages/thecorebackground.htm (as of right now, it can be found there, anyway - web is in flux, of course). For a technical overview, see http://www.teamworx.com/devxpages/structures.htm. for an overview (with excerpts) of the first chapter (of four total) of vol 1 of our book, see http://www.teamworx.com/devxpages/devx.htm.

We would like to offer interested parties the opportunity to have a look at what we've been up to. do you (all of you) think this is a good format for that? Linda Rising, who has been editing our writing, and helping us generally (and greatly) with the manuscript, suggested that we connect with your efforts in this area, which overlap, to some extent, with our own.

Have a look. let me know how best we could transmit this info to people who would be helped by it, or who might be willing/able to help us. there are truly a lot of goodies emerging from our enterprise.

-- jim mccartrhy

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