The Application Development Team Retreat
The project which has led to us getting this blog set up and embarking on what we hope will be a long and successful public engagement is our Application Development Team Retreat.
The Application Development Team do what the name suggests. We develop applications. However we tend to do this in a fairly meta manner, managing third party suppliers, buying in technology, deploying open source software and so on. What development we do is typically limited to integrating different systems, bug fixes, maintenance and enhancement. The annual offsite retreat is a chance to get together as a team and build some software from the ground up.
According to the document I've just been writing the goals of the retreat in order of priority are...
Get out of the office : less stress, less distractions
Work as a team : Seven people, one project. Not seven people twenty projects (give or take)
Learn stuff : From each other, from experimentation, from others (both in person and online)
Try new things : This year it's working in public, agile development (XP), ruby on rails, and anything else we come across
Build some software : We have a project that we're planning to work on, we'd like to think we can deliver something by the end of our three days offsite, but if that doesn't work out we won't mind too much, provided we get the other things on this list.