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Possible Duplicate:
How to productively spend “free time” at the office

Sometimes, especially at the end of the year in software companies, there is less work for the team, which happens in my company.

What should I ask my developers team to do during these cold days?

What things can they do to keep them focused and improve the company in the next year and future?

For sure there are tons of things to be done, I am just after some recommendations of new/fun things you do.

Amr Elgarhy
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    See http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/92905/what-do-you-do-when-you-have-nothing-to-do and http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/96322/how-to-productively-spend-free-time-at-the-office Both questions are closed as off topic. – knut Jan 01 '12 at 00:33
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    You must be kidding. Are your developers experts in everything? There is always something they can be learning or studying. For example, one of our developers had some down time so he spent some time learning how to create a Windows Phone app (something we don't do). – Randy Minder Jan 01 '12 at 00:43
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    You mean, other than hang out at stackexchange? – Mike Nakis Jan 01 '12 at 09:12

3 Answers3

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There are tons of things to do for a team. Here is a small list for the team:

1-Close open issues (if any) in the projects delivered (if this is in your scope of work)

2-Prepare write-ups about mistakes in the last project(s) and how to avoid them in the future

3-Prepare educational sessions about new features in the tools that are useful but never found the time to use

4-Research best practices in different aspects of software development relevant to your software tools

5-Consider automation of repetitive tasks by building small utilities or templates

6-Research on new tools in the market that can make the next development faster and better

7-Ask the more experienced developers to teach the juniors some useful techniques

8-Attempt to do some team bonding and team building activities

9-Let people know more about each other's roles. Let developers see what DBAs do more closely and what issues they face. You may find that some of your developers could fill up for a dba for a holiday or so

10-Review your coding standards, backup strategy, disaster recovery, licenses, etc.

11-Study problems faced by the team members in detail and put plans to fix them

12-Consider building or using a Wiki for the team

13-Polish your company's web site

NoChance
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    +1 for a good list. One more I'd add is adding unit tests to those features where team slacked (assuming that happened) during the release cycle. Also good practice for OP: during normal development, there's a ton of things that show up as "nice to have" items that developers never have time for. You can generate this list by regularly taking a pulse of your team and asking developers what's missing and what would help them be more productive. During slow periods, you should be ready to immediately start working on most important item in that backlog – DXM Jan 01 '12 at 00:48
  • @DXM: That appears to be part of (1). – Ben Voigt Jan 01 '12 at 00:49
  • @Ben: depends what you'd consider an "open issue". In my company when you said it to people, it's generally assumed you are talking about lower priority bugs that we never got around to addressing. Unit tests are additional code, not "issues". Different environments. – DXM Jan 01 '12 at 00:52
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    @DXM: If you meant bugs, you'd say "bug reports". "issues" is a broader phrase that includes work on requirements and validation. – Ben Voigt Jan 01 '12 at 00:54
  • @OP: when reading above list, my only suggestion is to make sure you consider unit tests as part of "open issue" list. If you already did, I apologize for assuming you may not have. Ben, you are now arguing about semantics and meanings of words in English language. I'm sorry I didn't automatically make the association between unit tests and open issues. You are right. – DXM Jan 01 '12 at 00:59
  • general code cleanup (refactoring and such outside open issues) is also a good item for this list – ratchet freak Jan 01 '12 at 01:07
  • @Ben Voigt, and DXM, thanks for sharing your comments. – NoChance Jan 01 '12 at 09:23
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    13. I wouldn’t dream of “polishing” my company’s website. I’d leave that to professionals. Which I’m not as far as websites are concerned. – gnasher729 Jun 02 '21 at 22:07
  • @gnasher729, yes you are correct. I was thinking of team web site or company web site for small companies. – NoChance Jun 02 '21 at 22:24
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I vote for letting them relax and recharge their batteries.

Antonio2011a
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Profile! Learn where the bottlenecks are in your application(s). Even if you don't do anything to fix the bottlenecks at this time (if you even can), at some time in the future it will be extremely useful to know.

Dave Nay
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