I was shopping today, taking advantage of the summer sales. One of my favorite retailers offers petite sizes online, but almost nothing in the store. I go to the store to try the clothes on and then decide what to order online. I had a number of blice (blouses to those of you who are
I’ve been in email contact with Pradeep Soundararajan for a few months now. He was recently at a conference in Toronto, and has posted his The (bad) state of software testing interviews in India, which includes a pdf of a talk he gave about interviewing. He has several wonderful ideas, including: Candidate and interview myths
I was speaking with a potential client about their approach to knowledge management. They think they need a senior person to organize a top-down appoach, and build a custom tool, so they know what knowledge they want to manage and have a place to put it. I don’t think that’s going to work. That approach
Jurgen interviewed me via email, 5 Easy Questions for Johanna Rothman. The questions were not easy!
Art Petty has a great post, Capturing Talent and Creating Great Customer Experiences: They Go Together. I really liked this part: A manager that takes mid-interview smoke breaks and badgers a talented candidate about salary expectations is someone that I want working for my competitor. I’m still astounded when I hear stories like that.
I recently met a lead whose business card read “Lead Phoenix Developer.” I asked what that meant, and he explained that he was a technical lead for an project code-named Phoenix. His business card could have read “Lead Developer” or “Technical Lead” and made much more sense. This almost happened to me today. I’m the
John Cook wrote a blog post, Scaling the number of projects, that starts addressing the issue of why it’s everyone’s job to manage their own project portfolios. Here’s an example of the problem he’s noticed: It sounds easy to manage independent projects: if the projects are for different clients and they have different developers, just
I’ve published a podcast: How Many Emergency Projects Do You Have? Enjoy!
Feature Article: 90% Done Is Not Almost Done Back when I was a new developer, my boss asked me how long it would take to complete a specific task. I looked at it for about 20 seconds, and said “Four weeks.” “Great,” he said. At the end of the first week, I was 25% done—that’s
I received two questions this week about how well does agile allow you to do traceability matrix. Very well is the short answer. Here’s why. If you commit to implementing features (not chunks of architecture) based on user stories in an iteration, you know what you’re planning before the iteration starts. Because you’re working in