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This may be a very unpopular approach, but it has always worked well for me. Look at the tenets of Extreme Programming and I would imagine you will find great success. First, how to break up tasks. I write very small user stories. I aim for things that can be accomplished in half a day. This forces me to do two things. We now have smaller tasks with tangible end goals that actually produce something for the end user. These are usually easier for everyone, from management to intern to understand and follow through to completion. We also don't overthink a task, bite sized chunks are easier to digest, after all. Second, as a few others hand pointed out, you have to trust your junior and mid level developers to complete a task on their own. Write the story in a way that they can understand what the end goal and tangible result will be. If you keep it small and discuss these openly, this will get a lot easier in a short period of time. Don't worry about the implementation details so much, that will come more in a second. Third, (here comes the unpopular parts!) TEST! Preferably, at least in my view, use Test Driven Development. Enforce an cultural change of moving towards testing. This will document the code as much as anything and if a refactor needs to be done after a junior or mid level developer completes a task, the tests will facilitate that. It will increase your level of trust in their work as they complete tangible user story goals. Fourth, pair program. You don't always have to, but heck after a while you might actually like it. Pairing allows you to riff off of one another. Junior and senior level developers can get a lot out of this, far more than just the junior learning something from the senior. If you are finding that your junior developers aren't "getting your style" pair for a while. You might start to understand them as well. Finally, all of this leads to trust. Look, code bases will need refactoring. I am quite Senior and I am sure if I sat with your code, or you with my code, we would find areas where things could have been done better. Trust that if the code works and does what it needs to do according to the small tangible goals of a user story, and that when it has accompanying tests, you and others will be able to refactor it and make it even better over time. |