I still have estimation on the mind. I saw The Impact of Accidental Complexity on Estimates and I was wondering about the effect of management on bad code. Do managers sometimes force developers to write bad code by allowing technical debt? Jay’s third point implicates technical debt as a cause: Introducing technical debt increases accidental […]
I often receive emails from readers asking questions such as “We have ten developers and two testers. How do we compare to our industry?”; “We have six-week iterations and a two-month hardening iteration at the end of our release. How agile are we?”; “We finish twelve stories in a four-week iteration. How many stories do
My column on Stickyminds is up: Measure Throughput, Not Utilization. Enjoy!
I’ve been working with teams and been a part of teams my entire work life. Not so much at university, but certainly when I started working professionally. I’ve been confused by what some people claim are self-organizing teams. To me, they don’t look particularly self-organizing. I read Brad Appleton’s excellent series of blog posts on
I’ve been working with several clients on their transition to agile. Yes, the technical staff needs training. Yes, they often need coaching on how to choose small chunks, estimate and commit to an iteration’s worth of work, and then to deliver that work. And, I am beginning to think the biggest problem in transition is
Who’s in Charge of Quality? At the Agile 2010 conference a couple of weeks ago, I heard many people say, “When QA gets the software, …” In an agile project, that makes no sense to me, unless the team has not developed its own definition of done. In more traditional projects, the people in the
I often meet people who are transitioning to agile, and they decided to pick Scrum, because it’s a helpful project management framework. Ok, that makes sense. But then they decide that they no longer need project managers, and that the development manager can act as the Scrum Master. The Scrum Master is not a management
I wrote an article for Cutter IT Journal, called “Agile Managers: The Essence of Leadership.” Cutter has made the entire issue available for free (registration required). See here. If you have comments, please leave them here. I will be posting the article at some point, but not too soon.
I’ve been working with teams who want to move to agile. Some people on their teams are in another location, where the salaries are cheaper. It’s difficult to get agile started with a geographically distributed team. If everyone’s distributed, it’s easier than if just some people–especially if they are all one function, such as developers
Sophie strode down the hall to Randy’s office. “Randy, what is this?” she asked as she waved a sheaf of papers. Randy looked up and said, “I have no idea. What are you waving around?” “Your plans for your group!” “Oh, my predicted project portfolio for the next six months?” “Yes! When were you going