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Essays on software development, teams and the craft of building things that last.
Essays from 2021
4 essays from 2021
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How to “control” a software project, and why control is never achieved with planning
When a software project starts, and we’ve put considerable effort into the planning tasks, we feel the project is under control. Or “in control”. However, that’s fundamentally wrong. I tried to come up with a way to describe how I understand control in software projects, to illustrate the need and applicability of the empirical management …
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#NoBacklogs: How to never lose a good idea by keeping the Backlog short!
“I’m afraid we might lose all these good ideas!” This is a phrase I hear very often when facilitating a Vision and Backlog session with the teams I work with. This is true for software teams as well as for business teams and mixed business + development teams. The fear of losing a good idea …
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The Project Slippery Slope: why the concept of Projects lead to Waterfall, sooner or later, but inevitably…
All that is below applies in the context that is defined here. This is not supposed to cover your personal “projects”, musical “projects”, art “projects”, home improvement “projects”, etc. You get the picture. In a company that uses the concept of “projects” to decide what to work on, fund, plan, control work (contextual boundary), projects …
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#NoEstimates for the perplexed – a simple principle that makes estimations obsolete
When we think of estimation, we immediately associate some concepts that are attached to the estimation activity: listing all the work, sequencing all the work, assigning all the work, etc. All of those activities are accessories to estimation. The fact is that a task does not have an intrinsic duration, it has a duration that …
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