In interacting with a software team recently, I realized that communication is often not the strongest suit that developers play. Here are some patterns that I observed that I find harmful to effective software delivery: 1) Communicate via status – When developers are using tools to manage tasks, defects, or other work packages, they often…
Culture
Normalized Perspectives
As software professionals, our beliefs about what qualifies as “best practices” often depends on our experience and our expertise. This is one of the reasons that it is so very difficult to run the self-organizing software teams, frequently described in agile literature. The fact is, teams cannot be self-organizing, until the members share mental maps…
Weaponized Metrics
Software teams hate metrics. They don’t like to estimate work. They don’t like to tell you how much progress they have made. I remember my first “team” project. PM asked me to estimate how long it would take me to finish a task I had never done before on a platform I was new to.…