I have — I hope temporarily — turned off commenting. I’m getting spammed by irrelevant and inappropriate comments. I’ve deleted close to 100 today already, and I’m not ready to delete more. Send me email if you want to talk or know of an alternative.
When I do assessments, invariably someone says to me, “JR, how long should the testing really take? It takes our testers (4/5/6/30 insert your number of choice here) weeks, and we need it to take less time. Why can’t it take less time and how can we tell what’s going on so we know
My colleague, a senior manager, is inundated with too much to do. Hundreds of emails, seven of hours of meetings every day, hundreds of emails, hiring the next level managers so he doesn’t have to backfill, project portfolio management, and backfill of those management roles not yet filled. My colleague is trying to manage
Read “Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully – in Ten Minutes”, and when you’re done chuckling, note the necessary ideas: His point #5: throw away reference books. This works for all first drafts. I don’t care if you’re writing a novel, a spec, or code. It works. Interrupting flow and what do you
Take a look at these links: Tricks of the Trade, thanks to Dave Liebriech. When I was a tester, I read the code (this tip is far down on the list.) I’m not sure the developers appreciated my questions, but if I didn’t understand something, I asked. Here’s a tip I learned for people
I had lunch with a friend-of-a-friend today. She’s considering moving to a process improvement position. I suggested she not move from a technical lead to a process improvement position — I don’t trust staff positions in this not-yet-robust economy. So I asked her why not do process improvement where she is, in her circle
Thanks to Brian Marick, I read Dave Thomas’s Weeding Out Bugs. Much of Bug-Weeding is developer turf. But here’s what managers can do to help: Look at defect counts by module. When you see a module that has more than it’s fair share of defects, start asking questions about what the developers are considering. You’ll
I was reading Hiring Great Hackers, and I realized what went wrong in the places I’ve worked who hired great hackers. (In this case, a hacker is not a derogatory term, it’s someone who lives and breathes producing great software — just not software that yet has a customer base.) The problem was the
Esther‘s here this week (again), so we can finish the pre-review draft of the book. We’re telling the story of a great manager who’s just arrived to a new organization. We describe meetings ,where we wanted to say “Everyone nodded.” I wanted to add “like bobble-headed dolls.” While that’s humorous, it’s not very respectful to
Well, that’s certainly a provocative title. Let’s see if I can back it up 🙂 First, read Keith Ray’s Engineering post, where he says “software development is a cooperative “game” in creating and deploying “knowledge” and various people-oriented practices help make that work” Some of my recent posts about requirements show the problems when software