Improving the world with software
Better software. Better questions.
Essays on software development, teams and the craft of building things that last.
Essays, page 25
314 essays in the archive
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What is so hard in a retrospective? People.
I’ve been doing retrospectives for a while at work. They have become so useful and part of my understanding of continuous improvement that I’ve started doing them at the end of every meeting or presentation I hold. The point being that I know I can improve, and it’s excellent that I have the opportunity to …
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Self-managing and self-organization in software development teams
Ed Gibbs in his blog posts a comment on self-managing teams that deserves some additions.He mentions that “[he does] have fears that some stuff gets left behind by making everyone a developer [self-managing team]”. He specifically mentions that Most organizations just have a lot of administrative stuff that someone has to take care of to …
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The Feedback Cycle is king!
Agile software development methods are organized around an important concept: the feedback loop. The idea is that whatever you do – coding, attending a meeting, doing a full project – you must have a way to gather feedback about what you did so that you can analyze it and improve based on that analysis. While …
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The complete software process needs to be agile
As a software project manager some of the problems that most puzzled me are related to how we can change the way the development team works with Agile methods to adjust for the parts of the software development organization that are not yet ready for Agile (localization, delivery, documentation, training, support, sometimes even testing). To …
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The Agile hype strikes again, IT Viikko, May 4th 2006
The new CEO of Qentinel Oy, a privately owned Software Quality consulting company here in Helsinki Finland, stated in an interview to the local IT weekly paper that: There is a lot of promising stuff in the Agile-side, but Agile works better for software product development than software delivery projects. I guess that by “delivery …
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Anatomy of a failed meeting
Meetings are a fundamental part of any software development project. They seem to be even more important to people that are not directly involved in the software project itself. If they are so important why are they so often boring, too long and unproductive? I’ll resist the temptation of trying to write here how a …
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The E-mail plague
Sometimes I ask myself how people lived without e-mail before. Some other times I ask myself how other people can live with e-mail now! Talking to a colleague at work we ended up talking about inbox overload and he confessed receiving 100 emails per day, out of which maybe 20 require answers and 5 require …
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Why do people spend so much time criticizing each other?
In this blog and others in the software community we try to learn from our experiences by expressing them in writing for others to read. I have a pragmatic approach to software development. I try new ideas, give them a fair shot if I believe they could work and then assess if they did work …
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99 rules too many…
Boy do the NASA project managers have it hard. Not only are in they under pressure from government and private entrepreneurs (remember the X-prize?) now they also have to memorize 100 rules! That’s what I would say 99-rules too many! I have only one rule:1- Use your head! OK, ok, that’s a simplistic way to …
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On Agile management
This week I came across two interesting articles about agile management (related to software of course ;). One is from Joel Spolsky, it’s called “The Development Abstraction Layer” and talks about the need for good management to enable the work of productive and creative software developers. The second article comes from CNN and is about …
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Writing the right documents
Here at our company we hear everyday amazing and interesting things. Once someone said “Let’s move these documents to wiki” – they were talking about a few of the dozen or more documents in one particular project. When asked why, they replied: “Because we want to ‘maintain’ these documents”. Hum… If that is the case …
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Agile shifts the economics of software development
I often hear this argument about “re-engineering” also known as “refactoring” in Agile circles: […] it is difficult to justify work that doesn’t bring any added value or whose results cannot be measured to evaluate the _immediate_ outcome. As a software development manager, I’ve been also on the side of “there’s no justification for re-engineering, …
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