I’ve been subjected to a bunch of team building activities that fell flat for me. My Last Word column in this month’s STQE talks about alternatives to team building. (See Teambuilding at Work.) Here’s the quick recipe: Choose a topic the team has a vested interest in solving. (If the people can’t come up with
I’ve noticed these problems with my blog, and am investigating: The comment number doesn’t seem to change with comments posted. Grrr. The last few posts *do* have comments. Bloglet is easily confused with my blog and doesn’t send email that I have new posts. Grrrrr. I suspect that if I stay logged into Bloglet, the
Many people who define requirements use some form of documentation to organize their requirements. Too often, that documentation is in the form of a text document. Because text is so bad at describing what a user interface does, the text becomes a design document for the user interface. Then the developers and testers are
I’m a fan of nightly builds with automated smoke tests, run overnight. In the morning when everyone returns to work, anyone who’s broken the build fixes it. In most cases, the developers see what they did and they fix it. The agile folks take this even further and say to build the system whenever
In Measuring Productivity #3: Possible Measurements, I made an off-hand comment, “The zeroth measure of productivity is showing up.” I now think showing up is necessary, but not sufficient. I’ve been thinking about what each of us produces individually, and thinking of ways to understand and possibly measure it: How many hours per day do you
I just returned from my younger daughter’s fifth grade graduation. (For those of you without children, sixth grade is now part of middle school.) It was lovely, and reminded me of how important it is for us to have rituals or ceremonies for the ends of significant work. If you’re scheduling a project, schedule
At a recent presentation about agile project management, I mentioned refactoring. One of the attendees said, “No, I don’t want to redesign the whole application every iteration. Agile’s not for me!” Well, I decided I couldn’t address the resistance if I didn’t first start with defining refactoring. I said, “Hmm, refactoring isn’t the same
The zeroth measure of productivity is showing up. Sorry I haven’t been showing up, but I have to admit, sleeping is good 🙂 Ok, back to business. When I tried to calculate productivity of a team, here’s what I measured for one team over the course of five releases (Apologies to bloglet subscribers; tables
When we think about manufacturing work, we measure labor productivity as the ratio of the output of goods and services to the labor hours devoted to the production of that output, output per hour. (See U.S. Dept of Labor) Remember the discussion of Project Constraints and Requirements? That’s where I said the project requirements were
In the past few weeks, too many managers have written to me, asking for help on knowing how “good” their people are. When I ask more questions, such as “What does good mean to you?”, they say they want to know who’s most productive. Then I walk through this analysis with them: Productivity is