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Essays on software development, teams and the craft of building things that last.
Essays from 2006, page 4
50 essays from 2006
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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Why do people spend so much time criticizing each other?
In this blog and others in the software community we try to learn from our experiences by expressing them in writing for others to read. I have a pragmatic approach to software development. I try new ideas, give them a fair shot if I believe they could work and then assess if they did work …
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99 rules too many…
Boy do the NASA project managers have it hard. Not only are in they under pressure from government and private entrepreneurs (remember the X-prize?) now they also have to memorize 100 rules! That’s what I would say 99-rules too many! I have only one rule:1- Use your head! OK, ok, that’s a simplistic way to …
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On Agile management
This week I came across two interesting articles about agile management (related to software of course ;). One is from Joel Spolsky, it’s called “The Development Abstraction Layer” and talks about the need for good management to enable the work of productive and creative software developers. The second article comes from CNN and is about …
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Writing the right documents
Here at our company we hear everyday amazing and interesting things. Once someone said “Let’s move these documents to wiki” – they were talking about a few of the dozen or more documents in one particular project. When asked why, they replied: “Because we want to ‘maintain’ these documents”. Hum… If that is the case …
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Agile shifts the economics of software development
I often hear this argument about “re-engineering” also known as “refactoring” in Agile circles: […] it is difficult to justify work that doesn’t bring any added value or whose results cannot be measured to evaluate the _immediate_ outcome. As a software development manager, I’ve been also on the side of “there’s no justification for re-engineering, …
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Builds should never fail! (for long…)
After arriving to work and checking my e-mails I decided to check in on my previous team’s results on the continuous integration system. Guess what? The build had been broken for 10 days! Continuing to develop on top of a broken build is dangerous as typically an error in the build process hides several other …
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How others see Agile/Scrum
In our company we have been going through the agile development transition for 1,5 years. The most interesting part of this transition is to see people’s reaction to the change. Certainly there are negative reactions (a lot) mostly due to lack of understanding or not being able to adapt to a new way of working …
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More Microsoft on Agility
This is one of the 3 (only 3!) points that Kevin Johnson, head of the “Platforms & Services Division” at Microsoft sent in an internal memo. You can read the whole article here. “3. Agility: Lay the foundation for accelerating our pace of innovation, including focusing on ways to improve clarity of decision making, drive …
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Agile Seminar: Team building in Agile projects, Part I
Last week there was the Agile Seminar here in Helsinki. During my talk I promised that I would make the content available so here we go. During the talk and through a story that I told at the start I tried to illustrate the first Agile value. I slightly changed the it’s phrasing from “Individuals …
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