Starting With Rolling Wave Planning
Also this week, over at the AYE Conference, my Starting With Rolling Wave Planning is up.
MPD
MPD
MPD, Stickyminds columns
Paying Off Technical Debt
I’ve had technical debt on my mind recently, so I’ve been writing about it. This week, the good folks at Stickyminds published my column, An Incremental Technique to Pay Off Testing Technical Debt. Enjoy!
MPD
Creating Transparency
I was at the Better Software conference last week, met a bunch of great people (including Jim Shore and Joel Spolsky). Another important person is someone who’s not famous–and important nevertheless. A senior tester explained her situation and asked for some help. “Most of our testers can’t read code. And, we don’t know what
MPD, project management
Project Managers and Technology
A reader was reading Characteristics of Great Project Managers and asked, “Do you feel that to be a great Project Manager one need not know completely about the technology involved?” No. Project managers need to understand enough about the technology so that they can make tradeoff decisions (or help product owners make tradeoff decisions) about
MPD, project management
A Project Needs a Vision
When I teach project management, I ask the participants to create a project charter (See my templates page for one I use to start). I recently encountered a battered project manager who does not have a project charter for a project with 6 or 7 sub-projects. This PM is smart, but has never managed a
MPD, workshop
Managing One-on-One
Since Esther and I started advertising our One-on-One workshop, I’ve been hearing wonderful stories about how managers and team members have benefited from one-on-one meetings. Here are some: A tester said he’d been ready to give notice when his manager started doing regular one-on-ones. WIth the advent of one-on-ones, his relationship with his manager
MPD
London Blogger Dinner Wed June 14?
I’m the featured speaker at the next SIGIST event June 15. (I’ll be speaking at at a private event at Grove the next day.) Since I’m flying over on Tuesday, June 13, I expect to be awake enough for dinner on June 14. If you’ll be in London, and you want to get together for
MPD
Architect as Consultant?
Given the thoughtful comments on Architects Must Write Code and Testing Design, I’m wondering if some of the difference in our beliefs stem from our perceptions of the architect’s role. I see the architect as the technical lead who shepherds a product through the overall design, someone who explains enough about the system and
MPD
Testing Design
In Architects Must Write Code, several architects responded that I was too prescriptive (I’m summarizing their comments). Maybe. But I don’t think so. I’m in a nice hotel, where things just don’t work completely right. Yes, the hotel is clean (that’s the big thing with me). The hotel upgraded me to a suite with an
Books, MPD
Another Review of Behind Closed Doors
In addition to writing this blog, I also write Hiring Technical People. And, I’ve met a bunch of great recruiting-type people through that blog. One of them, Jim Durbin, has written a great review of Behind Closed Doors. He calls it “a reference manual for technical managers.”