Normally, I am not one for song, but Roy hits one out of the park with this Police parody.

I am reinventing the acronym STD to be – Software Team Disease. Software Team Diseases occur when your team adheres to a social or technical anti-pattern that impedes progress or defies common sense. Examples of STDs that I have written about before maybe be Developer Heroism, Project Scapegoats, or Hippie Socialism.

Often software teams and their companies do not recognize the importance of protecting themselves against infectious behaviors. In my experience, the opposite occurs and more process is often created to mask STDs.

So how can we defend ourselves against STDs? Fighting STDs is done in the same 1-2-3 punch as normal diseases:

1. Identify Your Diseases

Identifying which behaviors are as infectious as a disease is the first step to cleaning up your team. Being ultra-aware of which anti-patterns your team is running will help you mark your strengths and weaknesses.

2. Knock Them Out

Be relentless at fighting the STDs in your software team. When fighting the flu, you don’t concern yourself with being politically correct with the flu. You aren’t concerned about being understaffed if you rid the flu. If you have disease in your team, get rid of it or learn to die with it. There is no middle ground.

3. Protect Yourself

Once your team is clean and healthy, keep it healthy. Holding code reviews and other retrospectives can help you identify STDs early.

It is important that we treat infectious behavior as critical as real STDs. Which STDs does your team suffer from? How did you solve them?

Before I announce the winners, I want to give a big thanks to those that participated. It was a lot of fun interacting with readers offline about different topics and guest posts.

Because so many people did cool things in different ways, it was really hard to score people using my original “score sheet” method. So I decided to hand them out categorically…and the winners of the 1st Annual Codesqueeze Reader Awards are…

Best Overall Reader – James Ehly from DevTrench! Not only did he write the guest post – 25 Signs That You’ve Got a Bad Client, but he also added me to his blogroll and ran StumbleUpon ads across his post. For his heroic efforts he wins the iPod donated from MonkeyJunkie.com!

Best Guest Post – Jason Gibb wins the best guest post award for his white hot post – Software Teams vs. Superheroes: Why the Solo Developer is Dead. He will receive the sweet laptop bag generously donated by Atlassian!

Best Commenter – Jeremy Neuharth has been adding his 2 cents since the start of this blog and brought the heat the last month and wrote the guest post – Sharpen Your Axe Before Starting Your Next Project. He will receive a signed copy of the new book Continuous Integration donated by Stelligent.

Best Linker – Arjan Zuidhof of Arjan’s World! Arjan won a prize without even knowing he was in a contest! For all of his linking to codesqueeze he wins the t-shirts donated by Atlassian.

A big thanks to all my readers that participated, but a final thanks to my gift sponsors:

• James Deboe – CEO of MonkeyJunkie.com home of the best deals on consumer electronics!
• Jon Silvers – Director of Marketing for Atlassian makers of the best damn continuous integration, bug tracking, and code coverage tools available.
• Burke Cox – CEO of Stelligent – a company chalked full of talent ready to give your company coaching on continuous integration and software productivity.

Thanks again everybody, hopefully next year will be bigger!