Improving the world with software
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Essays on software development, teams and the craft of building things that last.
Essays, page 23
314 essays in the archive
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Another interesting Agile Finland Seminar
Yesterday another Agile Finland seminar was held in Helsinki. There were 3 speakers and the guest star of the day was Tom Gilb. Tom has been working in this field for many years and pitches himself as a precursor of the agile movement. He mentions “iterations” as something that he popularized in one of his …
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Best practices are not the best at all!
I sometimes get tired of listening to people talk about best-practices, and today is one of those days! Deming a long time ago started pitching the idea of continuous improvement, back when the Japanese were the only ones willing to listen to him. In his now famous “plan-do-study-act” cycle (PDSA) he popularized the feedback and …
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A Seminar about Agile implications for old-school project managers
On November 14th, 2006 I’ll be speaking at a seminar about the implications of Agile on the lives of old-school project managers. The old-school project management is still probably the widest used approach to software project management and I tried to explain it’s core values here and here. My talk in the seminar will focus …
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Is the military getting “software development” ?
James Bach is a well known test specialist that has espoused Agile software development since the beginning. Even though the testing community is still searching for consensus (which may not even be a good thing) James is definitely quite ahead of the pack. His latest post on testing in the military is very “to the …
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Reducing waste
Tim Ottinger has a very good observation on his site about the importance of reducing waste and the difficulty of achieving it through Agile in organizations that are just starting. ‘Nuff said. Agile software development is all about eliminating collateral effort. No unnecessary documents, no unnecessary meetings, no unnecessary code, no unnecessary anythings. The mantra …
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The Buzzword-maisters and the bad manager
Reading a very “true” post in 37signals about our industry’s preference and dependency on buzzwords I came to think of my own experience with buzzword-maisters and their terrible destruction path. It seems to me that in our industry managers think they are smart but are very often tricked into choosing a particular technology/product just because …
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Why do we use Agile?
The question in the title of this post is an interesting one. Many people use Agile for the right reasons (because they think that it can help them with their work in many ways), but there are some people that do it for the wrong reasons: Because they like some part of one Agile methodology; …
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Systems Thinking applied to software
Henrik Mårtensson has posted two good pieces on systems thinking and software development in his Kallokian blog. Check them out here and here. It is worth it. I especially like this paragraph at the end of the second piece: Organize to optimize the value stream (flow organization), not to keep people busy (functional organization)! Both …
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It’s the motivation stupid!
This is something I’ve come across many times in my career. I constantly see motivated individuals excel against all odds and theoretically more prepared individuals fail when they should have made it with time left to spare. Now Jason Yip just linked to an article about that same fact: “Motivation is more important than innate …
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Command and control method of management
From Joel: In other words, the military uses Command and Control because it’s the only way to get 18 year olds to charge through a minefield, not because they think it’s the best management method for every situation. Go and read it, especially if you feel you are in a Command and Control company 😉
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Performance measurements can kill your efforts to bring Agile to your organization
Dave Nicolette has written a simple but really insightful piece on why performance measurement should be done with care and at the team level if you want an Agile team to gel and succeed. The bottom line: measure what your team produces and let them decide who is not worth to stay in the team …
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Why BDUF does not work
I have a really hard time trying to convince colleagues at work that Big Design Up Front (BDUF) does not work, that it is waste and the more time you spend coding the more likely you are to reach a better design solution. But before we go deeper into this discussion it is worth defining …
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