Improving the world with software
Better software. Better questions.
Essays on software development, teams and the craft of building things that last.
Essays from 2010, page 2
28 essays from 2010
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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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Agile is easy! It’s making it work with your business that is hard!
Last week I gave a talk at Turku Agile Day. The premise of the talk was simple: adoption Agile in R&D only is not enough. The goal was to create simple model to guide us through Agile adoption in a company (as opposed to a team). I came up with a model that included 3 …
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We continue to miss the point. It is not Kanban vs. Scrum, it is “people over process”!
The Scrum vs. Kanban debates rage on in the blogosphere but I can’t help but feel that our Agile community is missing the point. Where is the “People and interactions over processes and tools” that is part of the core values? I commented on Rachel Davies’s post about what she calls W-Agile (waterfall disguised as …
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On the decay of old media: Helsingin Sanomat goes back to the 1990’s
I was skimming twitter this morning when I saw a link to an article/blog post in HS site about how they plan to “revolutionize” the way people interact/work with HS today. First let me get this out of my chest: whoever was tasked with creating this project is either a complete noob in this thing …
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The Kanban vs Scrum argument stinks! But, can we learn anything from it?
There were some interesting conversations on twitter last evening, so interesting that they are worth some comment. There was an interesting back-and-forth between @jurgenappelo and @agilemanager about whether it is possible to do Scrum in a “pull” mode or not as well as other issues. But this was just the tip of the iceberg of …
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How about the mistakes we did by not doing anything?
I’m sure there are many good quotes from Russel Ackoff. Here’s one that makes my day, I see this happening all the time! “Schools and other organizations use accounting systems that only record one type of mistakes. If you do something you should not have done you pay the price, but not when you don’t …
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We need Proof!: Talk at Agile Saturday in Tallin
Last week I had the honor to present the keynote at Agile Estonia’s first public event. Agile Saturday was full of people from that community and it was great to learn how that community is being developed. The organizers also filmed the event, so here is the link to my talk video and slides. Enjoy! …
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We need proof! For a better understanding of our business, without religious arguments
Whenever you hear someone talk about Agile being better than X or X being better than Y don’t assume they are right. Ask for proof. For many years our knowledge and society at large have advanced through the tried and often questioned, but always upheld view that it is not sufficient to merely claim something …
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User Stories are representations of a conversation, not a list of requirements!
Great post by Martin Fowler about a hidden aspect of the User Story flow within a team. Many times I see teams that expect the Product Owner to behave just like a Requirements manager did in the past. Come up with the content, put it in the tool and stay out of the way! That’s …
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What we really need: without the effects of the reality-distortion field
As the idiotic rumor mill about a product that does not exist continues and probably increases until the middle of this week, I thought that it would be productive to talk about what we need, as of today, from a technological point of view. We already know that the apple tablet will save the media …
Nothing matches that yet.
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