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 …

The value Black Swan (or the killer improvement in software development)

Thinking back to how we value our work, we must recognize that, in software, quantity is not value! The number of things we do in a sprint does not vary too much, we can consider it a Gaussian (assuming correct and consistent measurement) — or in Black Swan (TBS) parlance: velocity is a variable from …

Separation of design and requirements may have destroyed more software projects than waterfall…

The people that convinced us to never mix design with requirements may have wrecked more software projects and destroyed more value in the software industry than anyone else! Just think what happens when you separate requirements from design: You don’t validate assumptions to more than a very superficial level (the “I don’t care about the …