Improving the world with software
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Essays on software development, teams and the craft of building things that last.
Essays from 2014
23 essays from 2014
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ScanAgile 2015 submissions are open!
Just a quick note today to let you know that the Call for Sessions for ScanAgile, the Agile Finland annual conference is open for submissions. You can read the whole call for sessions here. You will find the submission form in that page as well. For me the most interesting tracks are: Off-Piste: interesting lessons …
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5 No Estimates Decision-Making Strategies
One of the questions that I and other #NoEstimates proponents hear quite often is: How can we make decisions on what projects we should do next, without considering the estimated time it takes to deliver a set of functionality? Although this is a valid question, I know there are many alternatives to the assumptions implicit …
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Lean Change Management: A Truly Agile Change Management approach
“I’ve been working in this company for a long time, we’ve tried everything. We’ve tried involving the teams, we’ve tried training senior management, but nothing sticks! We say we want to be agile, but…” Many people in organizations that try to adopt agile will have said this at some point. Not every company fails to …
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The No Estimates principle: The importance of knowing when you are wrong
You started the project. You spent hours, no: days! estimating the project. The project starts and your confidence in its success is high. Everything goes well at the start, but at some point you find the project is late. What happened? How can you be wrong about estimates? This story very common in software projects. …
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The Release Paradox: releasing less often makes your teams slower and decreases quality
Herman is a typical agile coach. He works with teams to help them learn how to deliver high-quality software quickly. Many teams want to focus on design, architecture, or (sometimes) even on business value. But they are usually not in a hurry to release quickly. Recently Herman conveyed a story to me that illustrates how …
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How to create a knowledge worker Gemba
I am a big fan of the work by Jim Benson and Tonianne Barry ever since I read their book: Personal Kanban. In this article Jim describes an idea that I would like to highlight and expand. He says: we need a knowledge worker Gemba. He goes on to describe how to create that Gemba: …
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How to choose the right project? Decision making frameworks for software organizations
Frameworks to choose the best projects in organizations are a dime a dozen. We have our NPV (net present value), we have our customized Criteria Matrix, we have Strategic alignment, we have Risk/Value scoring, and the list goes on and on. In every organization there will a preference for one of these or similar methods …
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Hierarchies remove scaling properties in Agile Software projects
There is a lot of interest in scaling Agile Software Development. And that is a good thing. Software projects of all sizes benefit from what we have learned over the years about Agile Software Development. Many frameworks have been developed to help us implement Agile at scale. We have: SAFe, DAD, Large-scale Scrum, etc. I …
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What is an Estimate?
If you don’t know what an estimate is, you can’t avoid using them. So here’s my attempt to define what is an estimate.The “estimates” that I’m concerned about are those that can easily (by omission, incompetence or malice) be turned into commitments. I believe Software Development is better seen as a discovery process (even simple …
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What is Capacity in software development? – The #NoEstimates journey
I hear this a lot in the #NoEstimates discussion: you must estimate to know what you can deliver for a certain price, time or effort. Actually, you don’t. There’s a different way to look at your organization and your project. Organizations and projects have an inherent capacity, that capacity is a result of many different …
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Coming out of the closet – the life and adventure of a traditional project manager turned Agilist
I’m coming out of the closet today. No, not that closet. Another closet, the tabu closet in the Agile community. Yes, I was (and to a point still am) a control freak, traditional, command and control project manager. Yes, that’s right you read it correctly. Here’s why this is important: in 2003 when I first …
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Humans suck at statistics – how agile velocity leads managers astray
Humans are highly optimized for quick decision making. The so-called System 1 that Kahneman refers to in his book “Thinking fast, thinking slow“. One specific area of weakness for the average human is understanding statistics. A very simple exercise to review this is the coin-toss simulation. Humans are highly optimized for quick decision making. Get …
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