---
title: "Questions every team and dev lead should ask themselves"
url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2009/6/15/questions-every-team-and-dev-lead-should-ask-themselves.md"
canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2009/6/15/questions-every-team-and-dev-lead-should-ask-themselves.html"
published: "2009-06-15T22:43:34"
updated: "2009-06-15T22:43:34"
tags: ["Agile", "Art Of Unit Testing"]
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "here are the questions that teams and team leads should be asking themselves on a daily\\weekly basis. There are more, but these are the basics, to me. It’s part of the summary for the talk “Beautiful teams I am giving…"
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# Questions every team and dev lead should ask themselves

By Roy Osherove June 15, 2009 In [Agile](https://osherove.com/blog/category/agile), [Art Of Unit Testing](https://osherove.com/blog/category/art-of-unit-testing)

**Historical article** · Originally published June 15, 2009; technical details may be outdated.

here are the questions that teams and team leads should be asking themselves on a daily\\weekly basis.

There are more, but these are the basics, to me. It’s part of the summary for the talk “Beautiful teams I am giving at SEConf and NDC. we do a lot of this stuff [over at work](http://www.typemock.com/), and it’s proving itself on a daily basis.

**Whole team**

1. What can we automate?
2. where are we "Reinventing the wheel"?
3. what are the tools that slow us down?
4. what tools can we use better?
5. are there bugs that I could have found earlier? how do I make sure I find them earlier?
6. when do we find out we built the right thing?
7. when do we find out our code\\design sucks? how can we make that earlier?
8. How do we show progress at the team level? at the management level?
9. How many meetings does each dev have every week? how can we remove them?
10. Are we building by feature or by layer?
11. can we make all our team sit in the same place?

**Team Lead**

1. daily: what bottlenecks exist in the team? what have I solved?
2. will my devs be better in a month or two than they were before? if not, how do I make that happen?
3. what prevents my devs from working? what am I doing about this?

## More in Agile

[All posts in Agile](https://osherove.com/blog/category/agile)

- Jun 25, 2009

    ### [TDD Master Class almost full](https://osherove.com/blog/2009/6/25/tdd-master-class-almost-full.html)

- Jun 22, 2009

    ### [NDC 2009 – Done!](https://osherove.com/blog/2009/6/22/ndc-2009-done.html)

- Jun 6, 2009

    ### [Art Of Unit Testing available at Amazon](https://osherove.com/blog/2009/6/6/art-of-unit-testing-available-at-amazon.html)

- Jun 2, 2009

    ### [Using Explicit Arrange,Act,Assert scopes in tests – thoughts?](https://osherove.com/blog/2009/6/2/using-explicit-arrangeactassert-scopes-in-tests-thoughts.html)


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

### Social

- X: https://x.com/royosherove
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/

### Contact

- Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7

### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/