Origin story
The structure and function of grouplets is nothing new: It’s just an organization within an organization aimed at improving some aspect of the organization’s function. Like The Hero with a Thousand Faces, there are many other names for essentially the same thing, such as “working groups,” “guilds,” and “communities of practice.”
The term “grouplet” appeared to originate at Google. When Craig Silverstein, Google’s first employee, began to notice that the company was growing so large that communication between programmers was beginning to break down, he formed an ad hoc group called “the Grouplet” as a community to foster informal knowledge transfer.
As the company grew even further, it became apparent that one Grouplet wasn’t enough. In typical Google fashion, Craig sharded the Grouplet into what became the “official” family of grouplets, also known as “intergroups” or “intergrouplets”: Testing, Fixit, Readability (for coding standards), Documentation, Mentoring, and Hiring. In order to foster coordination and collaboration between the grouplets, and to advance the cause of groupleteering across the company, he established the Intergroup, a grouplet whose members were the leaders of all the other grouplets.
Mike Bland, the original primary author of this Guide, joined Google and the Testing Grouplet in 2005. He became one of the leads of the Testing Grouplet (and, thus, a member of the Intergroup) in 2006, and then switched to become the lead of the Fixit Grouplet in 2007. In collaboration with many, many others, including Mamie Rheingold, Ana Ulin, David Plass, Bharat Mediratta, and Nick Lesiecki, Mike and the Testing and Fixit Grouplets drove a successful five-year mission to make automated testing an indispensible component of the Google development culture. His talk The Rainbow of Death tells this story in detail.
This guide aims to help others recreate that spirit of teamwork and that level of impact across organizations everywhere.