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 …
“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 …
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 …
The fallacy of perfection = expensive has many forms. Two of which I just run into in the blogosphere. What is this fallacy? Simple, you say to yourself: “perfection in software development is way to expensive, therefore I should not even try to achieve it!”, but that’s a false problem, because perfection is only expensive …
The statement in the title is true even for those that are commonly recognized as great, as they say “here today gone tomorrow”. If you really want to be great you should not shout it out loud at every opportunity, you should recognize what your strengths are, play to them and always, always be on …
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 …
Through Elisabeth Hendrickson I got to Brett Pettichord’s post about the role of feedback in Agile. Read it if you haven’t yet. Here are the pearls that made me post this: “If you don’t have meaningful feedback then you’re not agile. You’re just in a new form of chaos.” and “Agile practices build a technical …
In Lean thinking errors or mistakes are seen as opportunity for improvement and growth. But in lean, mistakes don’t come alone, they also provide an opportunity for the team to create a poka-yoke tool/device. Poka-yoke stands for “mistake proofing”, i.e. making sure the same mistake does not happen again. This can only be done by …
Here is an excellent piece from the blog Evolving excellence about how a worker at Toyota battled his fear of admitting a mistake and was rewarded by his pears and supervisor for not hiding, but rather disclosing the mistake he had done. Admitting you committed a mistake is a very important part of continuous improvement. …
