As you can probably tell, I think people are the most important equation in successful product development. Good people can trump inadequate management and/or an inappropriate process. Dorset House has announced the pre-publication price for my book (available in September). I wrote a little more about this on my Hiring Technical People blog.
Last night at dinner, a friend said, “They love us. We’re only 4.8 FTEs, and (the rest of the organization) thinks we do the work of 6 people.” Guess what? There are 6 people. Not all of them work full time, which is why there are only 4.8 FTE (full time equivalents) for the
In a question to yesterday’s post, Bill asked about the effect of multiple ideas for problem solving: “Do readers feel they have to follow one of your multiple True Ways now? Or does the multiplicity meta-message encourage them to generate even more ideas?” Sometimes and Yes. Some people are even more impatient than I
This past weekend, my husband insisted we clean up the basement, and go through a bunch of old boxes. I discovered performance evaluations, memos, status reports, and some project plans dating back from when I started working until I started my business. I discovered a major pattern about my approach to work: Since I’ve never
Some of you are probably trying to plan your vacation around the project you’re on. Good luck. Every time I did that, the project was in some crucial place and my bosses asked me to consider changing my vacation. Don’t give in to their pleading. If the project is in good shape, you being
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. Here’s the quick recipe: Choose a topic the team has a vested interest in solving. (If the people can’t come up with one, you don’t have
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