Improving the world with software
Better software. Better questions.
Essays on software development, teams and the craft of building things that last.
Essays from April 2010
4 essays from April 2010
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Tired of useless boring planning meetings? Read on, I’ve got a solution for you
In a meeting today I was graphically reminded of how some of the basic concepts in software development still escape many of us. Case in point, the meaning of capacity. In many people’s minds capacity still means “how many man-hours we have have available for real work”. This is plain wrong. Let’s decompose this assumption …
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Why do we keep on giving up any control over our project? It would be so easy to keep it…
I get very often shocked by the comments that I hear from supposedly very smart people. Today was no exception. I heard the following comment: There is content we don’t want to timebox, therefore there’s no need to link it to any timeline… — Quote from someone that has direct responsibility over scope in a …
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Setting targets actually decreases your performance. Don’t believe me? See this video…
Many of the readers of this blog have probably faced this situation already in the past. When I was adopting Scrum in a local company, I was faced with the tyranny of setting targets. Targets and bonuses were part of that company’s HR policies. “This is how we motivate people” as the saying goes. Now …
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We all want more value. Fine! But what do you mean by value? A discussion on the meaning of “value”
In the agile community there’s been lately a great deal of talk about “value” and why that is more important than “process”. I also believe that we should try to optimize for value in our software environment, be it a small ISV or a big SW corporation. But what does value mean for you? The …
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