Dahlia Season Consulting

Originally published November 17, 2021 on cocktailmonkey.blog

Both open source projects and agile teams engage in the practice of working in public. This is the practice of having work happen in a public forum versus perfecting a piece of work in private, and then sharing it with the world or your team.

Why is Working in Public a Powerful Practice?

When we work in public we get the opportunity to collaborate deeply with others in the creation of a piece of work. By revealing work in a rough, or unpolished state, we allow others to bring their ideas about how a piece of work should be done. We harness multiple viewpoints, brains, and lifetimes of experiences to create the best product possible. 

There is another strong benefit of working in public, which is that those who are following along, watching the conversations and the work, are able to learn from those interactions. This turns the open source project or the agile team into a powerful learning crucible.

How Does Working in Public Happen?

In an open source project, the version control repository, the issue tracker, and the mailing list (or other forms of communication) are generally open and viewable by the public. Although a developer may need to work their way up to having committing rights to the code repo, they can read through the code before they are ready for that.

In an agile team, we work in public through the practices of pair programming, collective code ownership, and early code review requests. For the design process, teams will work in public by having open whiteboarding sessions, using collaborative Google docs, and other similar mechanisms. When having conversations, they will default to team Slack channels instead of direct messages, so that everyone can see the conversation happening, and add information if they have it. Even something as simple as asking for help in a slack channel can be a learning experience for the whole team.  

What Stops Us from Working in Public?

The biggest barriers to working in public are fear-based. One might feel uncomfortable showing work that isn’t perfect, as they might think that their colleagues will think less of them, and they will lose status in the team. There can be a similar barrier to asking for help in a public forum. Another barrier is when a person identifies too closely with their work product, and suggestions from others may appear offensive.

How Can We Learn to Love Working in Public?

The key to loving working in public is to foster a dual love: that of learning and that of creating the best possible products for our customers. When we look at our work product through the lens of making our customers’ lives better, we begin to look beyond our own insecurities and partner with our colleagues for the larger good. Similarly, when we embrace a love of learning, as well as growing others, we take any opportunity to ask for help, or to collaborate on solving a problem in public as we know that others are watching and learning from each interaction.

Questions to Explore:

• How comfortable am I working in public? What is my biggest blocker to doing more work in public?
• Do I ask for help in public venues? Do I ask for help early enough?
• Do I desire for my designs or code to be perfect?
• In what ways does my team work in public, and in what ways do we work in private?
• What are two things my team could try this week to do more work in public?