On the Toptal.com site there's a new post from author Timofey Nevolin sharing hist list of Eight Rules for Effective Software Production to follow to help keep your development process flowing well based on some of his own experience.

During the course of my career, I’ve participated in multiple real life software projects and observed how things are done on all levels: decision making, practices adoption, team building, recruiting, skill distribution, etc. Obviously, different approaches yielded different results. Being an improvement-oriented type of person, I noticed and collected the most effective practices and best practical tricks to help me up in my work.

Learning from observation is a hard and lengthy way to do it. I would be extremely happy to pick this knowledge earlier from books instead. Unfortunately, I found none on the topic. So I decided to share my experience with other seekers of this kind of knowledge. Hopefully, it’ll save them few years of personal research.

His list of eight, targeted mainly at those needing a productivity boost, includes rules such as:

• Understand the IT Mentality
• Stop Wasting Time on Formal Time Estimation
• Understand the Cost of Switching Tasks and Juggling Priorities
• Use Architecture Reviews as a Way to Improve System Design

He finishes with one of the more important rules to follow: valuing those on the team and respecting them for what they bring to the table.