Improving the world with software
Better software. Better questions.
Essays on software development, teams and the craft of building things that last.
Essays from January 2009
10 essays from January 2009
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Bas, and the world are not ready…
My good friend Bas Vodde just published a review of the panflet Scrumban. I see that his review is yet another manifestation of what I titled “the world is not ready“. I don’t think that his ideas are wrong, on the contrary, just that his ideas show that a lot of ground is still to …
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Acceleration, schmeleration. Scott Ambler misses the point…
Through this post on InfoQ I learned that Scott Ambler is writing about productivity in Agile and how to measure it. He comes up with an interesting concept, that of acceleration. Anyone familiar with statistical process control knows that a process does not have “acceleration” by itself. A process is either under statistic process control …
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Why failing matters…
In our world we are often pushed to succeed. All of time. But, as counter-intuitive as it may sound, failure is the key to success! If you are in a position where “they” say “Failure is not an option” or “Make it right the first time” and similar phrases, maybe you should make them watch …
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Another post in favor of another User Story format
Some time ago I wrote a post supporting the idea of a new template for the User Story. In that post I tried to explain why we should bring the “value” (because) clause to the fore, to make it the most important clause of the User Story template. Then John Arrowwood commented on that post …
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The world is not ready…
While reading a post and associated Twitter chatter between Karl Scotland and others I got to think that the world is not yet ready. For what? For flow. The idea that if you do one thing (to Done) first and then start working on another thing and get that to Done, you will be faster …
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Meetings are money (lost…)
Time is something that we cannot produce more of. If that’s so why do we still spend so much time on meetings that are not valuable? Would you give me money if I came to you in the middle of the day or better yet, if I sent you a money request through Outlook and …
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Turku Agile Day 09
Our friends in Turku are organizing their own Agile day. Check it out here.
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The worst decision you could ever make, and will anyway do it…
I’m sure this has happened to you. Probably many times over your long career in software development. You wake up, take a long hard look at yourself in the mirror and courageously make that decision you had been wanting to take for the past few months. You go back to the office, take your manager …
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Learn from the Sensei
It is seldom that we have the opportunity to learn from the masters, the Sensei. Here’s a good post for those of us that are interested in TPS (Toyota Production System). I especially like this part: In 1943 Taiichi Ohno was transferred to the automotive side of Toyota from the Loom Works. The architect of …
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What is a bottleneck? (TOC)
When faced with a problem in a process, the first step you should take is to identify the process map and bottleneck. This is nothing new, TOC people have been advocating this for a very long time as part of their “5 focusing steps“. But if it is why don’t we do it? Well, because …
Nothing matches that yet.
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