This is my last post for 2011 and I’ll keep it brief. I’d like to wrap up the year with two words: Context and Team. Context I read many rants on Twitter, blogs and various online publications regarding one software development approach versus another. In many cases, the context is missing. Without context, I can’t […]
Month: December 2011
Sooner or Later You’ll Need to Plan-Up
What’s better — producing a detailed project plan in advance or figuring it out as you go? It’s a bit of a trick question because the correct answer is neither. Here’s the reasoning. Let’s say that you could plan out every project detail before beginning to write any code. Let’s not worry about how long […]
My Software Project is “Almost Done” … I Think
The year 2011 is almost done as I write this. “Almost” is fully defined when it comes to calendar dates because there are a fixed number of days, hours and minutes left until 2012 is here. There will not be any delays or extensions. The end is near. My latest software development project is also […]
Software Waste Is an Insidious Problem – Eliminate It
Lean software development isn’t a set of procedures but rather a set of principles. Every software development team would be well-served by studying these principles: Eliminate Waste (focus on value creation) Create Knowledge (keep improving) Build Quality In (test and refactor continually) Defer Commitment (maintain loose coupling throughout) Optimize the Whole (don’t be dragged down […]
Electronic Kanban Boards Are Worth a Look
A wealth of electronic Kanban tools are emerging. Some have been around for a while and others are relatively new. Most charge a monthly or yearly fee. Some have a free option with restrictions. A few are completely free. Many teams prefer using a physical Kanban board drawn on a wall or whiteboard. They like […]
Working Software Is the Only Sensible Measure of Team Performance
A lot has been written about software development metrics. Clearly we need some way of determining how well software teams are doing and how fast they do it. Makes sense, right? There’s just one problem. The customer (or client, or end user) doesn’t care. If you tell a customer that the software team is working […]
10 Business Questions Software Development Teams Need to Answer
Software has brought us major gains in productivity and teamwork but often at a high cost. We have even come to expect software problems as a normal part of business. It’s difficult for non-technical users and managers to understand software development and deployment as they often don’t know what questions to ask. They are unable […]
Agile Development Won’t Solve Your Problems
There’s a popular misconception that agile software development can solve the major problems that plague software teams. I wish that was true but sadly, it’s not. Agile development approaches like Scrum, Kanban, Lean and XP are designed to reveal problems, not solve them. The solutions are situational — they take different forms depending on the […]
Obstruction of Progress Should Be a Criminal Offense
The differences in how small companies and large enterprises operate is staggering. Small companies usually make decisions quickly — not because they’re smarter (believe me, they’re not) but simply because their processes are simpler. There are fewer people and systems involved. In a small company, the number of interconnections among people and systems is relatively […]
Don’t Strangle the Team’s Strengths to Work On the Weaknesses
Have you ever heard someone say that you should focus on your strengths and not your weaknesses? It’s a bit of reverse psychology in the sense that it’s only natural to try and improve those activities that we aren’t good at — our weaknesses — and we should. But if we focus too much attention […]
What Is Your Project Team’s Signal-to-Noise Ratio?
In the world of hardware engineering, the concept of signal-to-noise ratio (S/N ratio) is widely used. If there’s too much noise in comparison to the amount of signal, the device will not work well and customers will not be happy. We should pay attention to the S/N Ratio concept when it comes to software engineering […]
Agile Development Is a Highway. Where Will It Lead You?
This is the tenth and final post in a series dealing with the impediments raised in “Agile Antipatterns Are Easy to Spot, Hard to Change”. The tenth antipattern discussed in the original post is… 10. Believing that agile is strictly a software development issue, not a business one It’s usually the software development team that […]