Month: September 2013

Sprint Work Efforts Have To Be Sustainable

There’s a natural tendency on many agile software development teams to rush the work effort near the end of a sprint. Let’s face it, a deadline is a deadline. The team commits to completing a set of stories during the sprint. They work hard and often scramble near the end to keep their commitments. There’s […]

Stop and Think About Your Assumptions

What are you assuming? Every software development project contains many assumptions. Often, they’re obvious things like “the software has to operate in Windows 7 using IE 9 or above”. Yet at times, they’re not quite so obvious like “the software has to be written in Java”. The problem with assumptions is simply that they are […]

Is a Sprint in Scrum a Project?

Focus on the product not the project. We use the term “project” a lot in software development circles. One person might be building a small desktop application or a massive group of teams might be implementing an enterprise solution. They are both projects. Neither the development approach nor the technology suite matters. Ultimately, anything can […]

You Might Be a Bottleneck If…

You know what a bottleneck is, right? In this context, a bottleneck is a stage in a process where progress is retarded or blocked. Bottlenecks can slow down software development teams to the point where failure becomes imminent. Bottlenecks are all too common. They can be caused by anyone who tries to do the right […]

Dysfunctional Teams Never Deliver Great Software

Technologists love to argue and it’s really easy to start an argument. Here goes — my software development approach is better than yours! My approach has a better success rate. My approach delivers better results. It works for me so it’s the approach that everyone has to use. Only an idiot would develop software any […]