We work hard. Sometime we work on 1 project during 3 weeks or on 3 projects during 1 week. Earlier we were surprised but understood the right way is to adapt to a customer/business circumstances instead of whining because of the imperfect of projects.
So we started to see gaps for self improvements in such circumstances. We started to experiment a lot.
What we’ve tried and what has helped:
- AGILE and SCRUM – everything changes so be agile or die.
- Retrospectives – sit and talk clever frankly regularly time-boxed is the only right way to find gaps and improve the team
- XP and a few practices to improve code quality: common code style, component comments, architecture meeting, MVC, pair programming, refactoring.
- collaboration tools: Skype, Basecamp, Pivotal Tracker, SVN, google docs. Read about our experiments with Git - now we are solving more obvious gaps but we’ll use Git more later.
- Less skype chat, more formal email with customers. Generally more formal communication like User Stories and fixed features for sprints.
I can forget something to note but the main idea is to be always in research:
- find and try new practices but use only those really help you.
- optimise company processes by finding and removing trash.
Progress
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Visualize
It’s more for fan than for formal decisions, but I used Gource to visualize the development process for a customer project.
Update.
This project guys did when I was absolutely offline for 11 days.
Crossfunctionality in action 
Be always attentive – no chance to laziness.