Nov
7
NT and ST Developers
November 7, 2005 |
One thing that occurs to me about Agile methods is that they’re aimed squarely at the NT developer. No, not Windows NT. I’m talking about the Myers-Briggs personality types.
However, in practice, I find that a lot of developers are ST types–meticulous, but very uncomfortable without real guidance on what and how they should build things. They need to be told what error conditions to test for, what error messages to return, the appropriate wording of those messages and so forth. In other words, they want a detailed requirements document. They’re not comfortable being handed a “big picture” overview and told to fill in the details…nor are they really able to construct that picture themselves. On the other hand, they have the patience and the attention to detail that NTs tend to lack.
A development team heavily staffed by STs will do better if it is led and with a process that imposes discipline. An NT team, on the other hand, will probably like a more free-wheeling style. If you have the luxury of choosing your team, keep this in mind–but don’t go too far either way. A team with too many NTs will require a fair bit of effort to ensure that everyone’s on the same track, and those STs are vital for making sure that the build process is in place and working, for getting automated tests in place and running, and generally doing what NTs think of as the boring grunt work. It may be boring, but I suspect that the failure to do that work derails more software projects than anything else.
(If you care, I usually test out as INFP, and close to the borderline on the F/T divide).
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