Its compensation season in many companies. Performance evaluations are either complete or in process, managers are deciding who will get more and who will get less. It can be a sore point for some employees, especially if their evaluation comes as a surprise. Its worse, when the employee does not have a way to fix…
Culture
Customer as Boss
Periodically I have observed people complain about their employees or co-workers, and occasionally I have complained myself. Sometimes people at work act as if they are either ignorant of who their customer is, or as if they don’t care about their customer, it sometimes it is hard to tell the difference.
What Did The Boss Say?
Last year, two goofballs from Norway released a song they thought would be funny, called “What does the fox say?” that turned into a viral hit. The concept for the song is that we know all the sounds the animals make, but not the fox. Today, I want to talk about things our bosses say.…
Vacations and Holidays
It’s been a while since I posted on this blog. It has been a nice time off for me, as I have taken a break from writing for about 6 weeks. In this time I have taken a vacation from work, and changed some of my technology around. Now I am away from work spending…
Quality Beyond “Working”
When you think of the term “Software Quality”, what comes to your mind. Let me propose that how you think of quality depends heavily on your “relationship” to the software product. If you are a user of that software product – quality relates to the following qualities in order: Operational Correctness – It produces the…
Design Philosophy And Coding Style
Caution, Rant Alert! In my career, I have been some kind of leader on about a dozen new application projects. It is interesting to me that the only time I have ever heard about “design philosophy” or “coding style” is when some new developer comes on a project and gets his butt handed to him…
Six Things I Have Learned About Staffing Software Development Teams
This is a collection of observations about things that managers and leaders of software teams encounter or trip over. This post comes out of a series I am doing about IT Staffing Strategy, but these are localized to the software team, not the larger strategy picture. These are very similar to Johanna Rothman’s excellent Management…
Put the Yak on the Stack
In a prior post, I introduced the concept of Yak Shaving. In this brief post, I want to introduce a strategy for preventing Yak Shaving. The developers on this team have become sensitized to yak shaving, and often report that they ran into a yak on the way to done. They have to make a…
Re-engineering: the Path to Complete
In a recent estimation exercise with a software delivery team, I cast the following assumption: “No classes that were not directly impacted by the story being estimated would be re-engineered.” This is an important assumption, for this team, because they tend toward boy scouting. They always want to leave the code base (camp site) better…
Proper Task Length
Glen Alleman in his post How Long Should Tasks Be gets to the heart of an important issue. When planning, how long can you wait before you know that you are late. In principle, it works like this – you don’t know you are late until you fail to complete a task on schedule. How late…