Do you ever feel like the organization around you has lost the plot? That we (collectively) no longer remember why we do all of the things that we are required to do? That we spend an inordinate amount of time on activities that don’t really help. It is very easy for processes and procedures to…
One Thing At A Time
This post is about things that can go wrong on an agile software delivery team. One thing that I have learned over years of software delivery is that you have to finish something, sometime. You have to deliver a working capability, feature, or story. When you finish an iteration with no working stories – you…
Development Anti-patterns
Fear Driven Development – When developers are under time pressure, and are more concerned about their reputation than their code base. They tend to deliver half baked code with all kinds of smells – to get it out the door on time – without thinking of the consequences. When their bad practices are called out…
Working or Done
Last night I woke up in the middle of the night, worried about a specific problem in our model layer that I was sure was going to cause problems if it wasn’t resolved. I tossed and turned until about 2:30 when I got out of bed and went downstairs and fired up the laptop. …
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…
Helping the Team
Perhaps you have experienced the struggles of on-boarding new developers into an already large team in the middle of a project. Everybody who comes wants to have a say in how things are done, no matter how late in the process they get involved. Here is a litany of the types of commentary that I…
Fixed Feature Bids
I have worked with a lot of teams made up primarily of contract developers. Not teams from consulting firms, but teams of “assorted” contractors from assorted staff augmentation firms. Folks that have been doing “short term” staff aug work for a while – (by my definition not longer than a year) – have an hourly…
Stretch Role
Hiring has some words that we use to describe what we are looking for: 1) Been There, Done That – you want someone who can do this job with their eyes closed. 2) New Blood – you want someone who will never say, “that is not the way we do it here”. 3) Fresh Meat…
Mechanics Building a Car
Sometimes building software is ugly. There, I said it. Sometimes, especially at the beginning of a project that will result in a new system, especially when you are working with a new (to you) software paradigm, especially when you are working with a new team, building software is ugly. I recently was part of a…
Agile Delivery Manager vs. Project Manager
When you adopt agile practices, especially agile life cycle plans – it is really simple to have your project manager become the scrum-master, right? Isn’t that what everybody does? After all, it’s just swapping a gantt chart for a burn down chart, right? It certainly is what all of the project managers do when their…