Games are a cost-effective and efficient way to evaluate, assess, and thus hire people with the right expertise and aptitude. It is an equally practical and powerful way to continue to develop and improve the team and individual team members. Try using games to improve your efforts to build and maintain an outstanding team.

In the quest for writing good code and delivering the right thing to customers, developers have several challenges. But most of them can be boiled down to two main problems: discovering the real scope, and how to do the work. Interestingly, they’re very similar to the problems faced by testers and others in non-dev roles.

There are work items that will give the team an operational boost and perhaps avoid a crisis, but that never make it to the top of the priority list—like build and deployment improvements, or paying down technical debt. For enabling work that is valuable but too invisible to be a priority, consider breaking it down.