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Essays on software development, teams and the craft of building things that last.
Essays from April 2008
13 essays from April 2008
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Communication is really hard! No, seriously!
So, we knew already that communication is hard. Nothing new there, but here’s a few insights into why, the so called Wiio’s laws. Remember the discussion about why we should no rely on documentation to share information? How about this law: Communication usually fails, except by accident Sobering observation! Now, wouldn’t you wish you had …
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An inconvenient truth, in work management
I bet anyone in my position (Agile Coach) has faced this before: you present a work method to a team or a person (be it scrum, XP, DSDM, FDD, etc.) and they go “yeah, I see what you mean, but that would never work here”. If I only had a dime for every time I …
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Personal Scrum, 2006
So Personal Scrum is not that new. That does not surprise me as it seems to be such a good process for managing any work that, in my view, approaches a basic Pattern in work/tasks/time management. Great article.
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Respect for people, the translator’s edition
In the spirit of Lean my colleague and friend Mika Pehkonen writes how they are able to respect people, get them to do what they are best at and most motived to do. I’d say that’s a win-win-win situation! we pay our translators by the hour, not by word count. This means that the translator …
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End the never ending design discussions: Timeboxed estimation for User Stories, a pattern in Agile adoption
In this post, Jason explains one common problem with the estimation and planning sessions in Agile teams. The problem he describes however, is quite common and has lead to implementation of the Separate Design and Requirements anti-pattern in the traditional software development world.So I thought I’d write a pattern about a simple and common solution …
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Story points explained, a good addition to the timeboxed estimation pattern
Just after writing the post about about Never ending design discussions I found one post from Lasse about story points. I think these two posts go very well together, as story point-based estimations is what I use for the Timeboxed estimation pattern.
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Project smells
Jason suggests that projects, in his experience, face similar problems (I’m assuming he is talking about all projects, including Agile projects). What is your experience? What are the mistakes that happen all the time as Jason suggests? In the waterfall world one of my favorites that happened all the time was: requirements change constantly. Can …
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Apple vs. Nokia, spot the differences
Being in Finland I’d love for Nokia to continue to be a big player in the mobile phone and mobile Internet access market. I lover their N810 device (just don’t get why they did not put a GSM chip in it…), and have been a loyal customer of their mobile phones. But that is about …
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The Green Shift Anti-Pattern
This is a pattern that effectively prevents any team from succeeding, and in many cases just causes a whole organization to behave in a dysfunctional way. Check it out. Has it happened to ? No, honestly! Blogged with the Flock Browser
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What does your shell history say about you?
Macintosh:~ vasco$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head63 svn56 cd47 ls26 sudo26 man23 ruby17 find15 /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql12 dir9 set “svn” is explained because I’m not familiar enough with RADRails in Eclipse and it is really easy to use command line for two word commands anyway 🙂“cd” and “ls” are a waste …
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Don’t blame, reward people that surface their own mistakes!
In Lean thinking errors or mistakes are seen as opportunity for improvement and growth. But in lean, mistakes don’t come alone, they also provide an opportunity for the team to create a poka-yoke tool/device. Poka-yoke stands for “mistake proofing”, i.e. making sure the same mistake does not happen again. This can only be done by …
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The Proxy Product Owner, a pattern in Scrum adoption: version 1
Below I try to describe a pattern that I’ve faced and have seen in other teams in the context of an Agile transition.See the explanation section for more details on each of the sections in the pattern.If you have faced similar situations let us know of your own story in the comments below. Proxy Product …
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