Rypple Special Forces

Matt from 37signals posted a great summary about the power of small 12 person Special Forces teams. Check out his post A-teams = 12 people on the 37signals blog.  Matt states that small team size has numerous advantages: “They’re self-contained, can work swiftly and quietly, don’t have the presence of conventional military troops, and are able to operate without a big infrastructure.”

Here at Rypple we’re making our own Special Forces teams by dividing our nine developers into teams of three. Much like the way a Special Forces unit functions, each member of our dev teams is specialized in one area but every team member can do each job if necessary.

We’re loosely basing our new team format on pair programming (though without the actual sitting together in front of a screen). We’ll be doing a lot of code reviews and close collaboration, which allows a small group of people to review the same task, collaborate on code, and do UI design and testing. Heaps of usability bugs are found this way and, more importantly, a lot of security issues are caught at an early stage. This is also great for new members of the team as they can quickly get up to speed on our coding practices.

We’re (jokingly) coining a new term: ‘triplets programming’. We’ll run with our small Special Forces development teams for at least a month. Every week we’ll be posting an update to let you know how our small teams are working, so stayed tuned!