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 …

Hire generalists to help your specialists shine!

Imagine you are developing a highly-specialized embedded software product. Like a radio tower for the GSM/UMTS network, or a high-frequency trading back-end for a large New York trading firm. Why would you want to have generalists in that team? After all, these are niche-niche-niche products. Maybe a few thousand people work on these projects in …

Why specialization in Software development is bad for business

Specialization in software development hurts our business! I’m not talking about the kind of specialization that leads to spend some more time in one area than in others. I’m talking about the specialization that leads us to have Database Administrators (DBA) or Database Designers (DBD) or Kernel programmers that don’t do anything else! Take the …

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 …