In the last few weeks, several people have asked me how much rework is normal. Well, if you’re working in a test-driven development environment, you probably have very little rework. My estimates for the few real test-driven projects I’ve seen is that they spend about 10-15% of their time on rework (finding problems and
I recently spoke with a hiring manager who was unhappy about a candidate’s references, “All the references are for jobs 10 years ago. And he’s had 4 jobs in the last 5 years. Why aren’t there references from those jobs?” If you’re a hiring manager, you’ll notice many candidates were either unemployed or had multiple
Sometimes I discover that one of my great ideas has already been discovered by other people 🙂 I first wrote about rolling wave planning in 1997. For those of you who can’t stomach the paper (it was one of my earliest pieces of writing), here’s an updated description of rolling wave planning: Loop: Plan what
I’ve talk about ads that help candidates screen themselves in or out. Here’s a great example from Ikea: “We’re hiring Why-Sayers” See Phil Wolff’s entry for the details.
I’ve just returned from the last of my spring conferences. And, I’m struck again by how much training is available to people at conferences and how cheap it is. You may be shaking your head, saying, NO JR, Conferences are expensive, about $5000 per person for the week, once you factor in travel along
A reader asked about interviewing interviewers: “it might be interesting if the person being interviewed were allowed to ask some technical questions of the interviewer.” Yes, you can absolutely ask question of your interviewers. And the best question might not be the stump-the-interviewer questions (in the same way that the stump-the-candidate questions aren’t the best
I’ve been at the STAR conference this week, and Cem Kaner’s keynote talk yesterday discussed the idea of extended random regression testing — take all your programmatic tests, and run them in random sequences for a long time. You’ll find defects you cannot find just running the tests by themselves. Here’s the logic behind this
I’m not a big fan of body-of-knowledge based certifications. Testing to someone to detect if they’ve learned the words in books is not adequate to determine actual skill on the job. (Note that there are skill-based certifications, generally from vendors, that appear to be quite useful at detecting if the person is capable of performing
I had a great time in Israel (taught an open-enrollment project management workshop plus a one-day tips and tricks as an onsite), and met up with Israeli bloggers. It was wonderful meeting people with whom I’d corresponded.Now that I’m back on the east coast and recovered from a little jet lag, I’ve been catching up
I’m off to Israel for a week, starting today. If you’d like to meet me for dinner Sunday night, 20:00, contact Roy Osherove. If Sunday doesn’t work for you, send me an email and maybe we can figure something else out. Back to regular blogging tomorrow…