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Essays on software development, teams and the craft of building things that last.

Essays from May 2006

6 essays from May 2006

  1. Self-managing and self-organization in software development teams

    Ed Gibbs in his blog posts a comment on self-managing teams that deserves some additions.He mentions that “[he does] have fears that some stuff gets left behind by making everyone a developer [self-managing team]”. He specifically mentions that Most organizations just have a lot of administrative stuff that someone has to take care of to …

    2 min read

  2. The Feedback Cycle is king!

    Agile software development methods are organized around an important concept: the feedback loop. The idea is that whatever you do – coding, attending a meeting, doing a full project – you must have a way to gather feedback about what you did so that you can analyze it and improve based on that analysis. While …

    2 min read

  3. The complete software process needs to be agile

    As a software project manager some of the problems that most puzzled me are related to how we can change the way the development team works with Agile methods to adjust for the parts of the software development organization that are not yet ready for Agile (localization, delivery, documentation, training, support, sometimes even testing). To …

    1 min read

  4. The Agile hype strikes again, IT Viikko, May 4th 2006

    The new CEO of Qentinel Oy, a privately owned Software Quality consulting company here in Helsinki Finland, stated in an interview to the local IT weekly paper that: There is a lot of promising stuff in the Agile-side, but Agile works better for software product development than software delivery projects. I guess that by “delivery …

    1 min read

  5. Anatomy of a failed meeting

    Meetings are a fundamental part of any software development project. They seem to be even more important to people that are not directly involved in the software project itself. If they are so important why are they so often boring, too long and unproductive? I’ll resist the temptation of trying to write here how a …

    3 min read

  6. The E-mail plague

    Sometimes I ask myself how people lived without e-mail before. Some other times I ask myself how other people can live with e-mail now! Talking to a colleague at work we ended up talking about inbox overload and he confessed receiving 100 emails per day, out of which maybe 20 require answers and 5 require …

    2 min read

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