Improving the world with software
Better software. Better questions.
Essays on software development, teams and the craft of building things that last.
Essays, page 14
314 essays in the archive
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Waterfall in a Scrum world, yes it is possible. See how below
Can you do waterfall at the same time you are doing Scrum? Let’s explore the subject a bit… We all know what problems there are with waterfall and long term plans that are not changed. We start executing the plans and see that things don’t really work out as we thought but we stick to …
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Response to critical article on Kanban
I was reading Chris McMahon’s post “Against Kanban” and could not help but think that a response was in order. The post below is a response, in detail to the (flawed) arguments that Chris makes against Kanban. “were revolutionary, because they were software development processes actually created from scratch by people who were very very …
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A feature team needs more than a cross-functional group!
In a conversation with a friend we identified an anti-pattern that can often happen to “feature teams”. Feature teams are supposed to be cross-functional groups that focus the software development process in valuable-chunks of work, which normally cross the whole system (vertical slices of the system).[1] There’s a way in which you can meet that …
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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 …
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Pearls of Wisdom: Taiichi Ohno on management
It is rare that one reads something written in 1978 that feels relevant to today’s world in so many ways that is hard to explain all of its consequences. This is what happened today and I wanted to share that. The following is a couple of paragraphs from the “Toyota Product System” (TPS) by Taiichi …
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Demos, not memos!
An interesting story over at 37signals’ blog about a company/site that was started against someone’s better judgment because the people involved saw a working version of the site not a requirements document!My favourite quote: 1. Ideas are cheap and plentiful. Execution is hard. 2. Meetings suck. 3. Requirements documents suck. Read it. You owe it …
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Does Toyota really use waterfall for software development?
I saw this post and could not resist leaving a comment. Here’s what I wrote as a comment to that post: How can they [Toyota] apply waterfall and be predictive, fast and high-quality? Those are all qualities that waterfall lacks. Predictability is lost because of lack of visibility into quality until it is too late …
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Marketing fail redux, the Agile Process edition
I was reading a web-site from a “well know” process person/company in the software field (which will remain unnamed) and found the following quote (names changed to protect the guilty): XYZ corporation senior management decided that ABC Unified Process is the way for better quality, higher productivity and lower cost. I can’t begin to describe …
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The curious case of buttoned-up Benjamin
Benjamin works in a consulting company where there was no dress-code unless the client would have a dress-code. Since most consultants were testers and coders (and you know how we dress) the clients understood not to demand a formal dress code. Then Benjamin’s company changed his boss. The new boss required and insisted on everyone …
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The Software quality hash tag #swquality
If you do Twitter you probably know exactly what I’m referring to, if you don’t here’s an article you should read. Together with @most_alive and @Mendelt we just coined a hash tag to aggregate discussions about the cost of quality in software development. The hash tag is #swquality just add that to every tweet that …
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Perfection in software is cheaper! not more expensive…
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 …
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What makes a great company? Recognizing you are not one yet…
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 …
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