Improving the world with software
Better software. Better questions.
Essays on software development, teams and the craft of building things that last.
Essays, page 7
147 essays in the archive
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Short multimedia review of LESS 2010 conference
The LESS 2010 conference just ended on a positive note of shared knowledge, bridge building between different communities and celebration of great work in the area of Software Development. LESS was started with a great ambition of combining, from the starting point three different communities globally. Those communities were the Agile community, which is focused …
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Short video introduction to my sessions at Agile Eastern Europe 2010
In about 3 weeks I’ll be flying to Kiev and meeting some of the best Agilists in the planet. But it won’t be just fun and games for me. I’m already stressing about my sessions. Check out the video introduction of my sessions at Agile Eastern Europe and, while you are at it why not …
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Waterfall leads to 90% ready 90% of the time! (the very definition of unpredictability)
One of the most common anti-patterns I’ve seen in waterfall projects is the “90% done syndrome”. It goes like this: the project will get quite quickly to 90% readiness and will look to be on time until that point. However, after the 90% readiness point is achieved we start to see more and more delays …
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The three main trends in long agile adoption processes
I was having a discussion with fellow agile adopters yesterday and a bunch of interesting patterns emerged from the discussion: We are getting to agile/process improvement fatigue The management of software development is changing, but agile adoption processes do not have a mandate to change the management approach We don’t have a process to learn …
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Stop fighting reality, take the red pill! A tale about managers
Today I’m on a mood for a rant. Be warned! 🙂 I constantly get gob-smacked (to borrow a term from a friend) about the lack of simple understanding of reality. Let me explain. One particularly common symptom in management is that they tend to “believe” (that’s the word) that they can affect what happens in …
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Agile Eastern Europe announced, I’ll be visiting
It is now official, I’ll be speaking at Agile Eastern Europe. Hope to see you there!I’ll be hosting a workshop and a talk. Both are about the business view of software development. One will be specifically about Agile: Business Agility. How to take advantage of an Agile R&D?Many companies have jumped on the Agile bandwagon. …
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Don’t just plan, plan to be surprised!
Walking a tightrope without a net maybe good entertainment, but it’s hardly what project teams enjoy the most. When the deadline comes and your team is late, you know why that is. No matter how well you plan (and you must) there will always be a volcano or a flood or simpler things like changing …
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Tired of useless boring planning meetings? Read on, I’ve got a solution for you
In a meeting today I was graphically reminded of how some of the basic concepts in software development still escape many of us. Case in point, the meaning of capacity. In many people’s minds capacity still means “how many man-hours we have have available for real work”. This is plain wrong. Let’s decompose this assumption …
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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 …
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Setting targets actually decreases your performance. Don’t believe me? See this video…
Many of the readers of this blog have probably faced this situation already in the past. When I was adopting Scrum in a local company, I was faced with the tyranny of setting targets. Targets and bonuses were part of that company’s HR policies. “This is how we motivate people” as the saying goes. Now …
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We all want more value. Fine! But what do you mean by value? A discussion on the meaning of “value”
In the agile community there’s been lately a great deal of talk about “value” and why that is more important than “process”. I also believe that we should try to optimize for value in our software environment, be it a small ISV or a big SW corporation. But what does value mean for you? The …
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Agile is easy! It’s making it work with your business that is hard!
Last week I gave a talk at Turku Agile Day. The premise of the talk was simple: adoption Agile in R&D only is not enough. The goal was to create simple model to guide us through Agile adoption in a company (as opposed to a team). I came up with a model that included 3 …
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