project management
We’re not so different, you and I
Ben Sandofsky wrote a post about why QA departments are still necessary, specifically with regards to mobile app development. He makes a good point: mobile apps create a distribution bottleneck that makes very rapid iteration impossible. I agree, and this is a good angle to think about. I would...
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The QA Department Mindset
From this post by Rands, titled “The QA Mindset”: At the current gig, there’s no QA department. […] My concern is that the absence of QA is the absence of a champion for aspects of software development that everyone agrees are important, but often no one is willing to...
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Long live Slack, down with egotistical email
We use Slack for team communication at Cozy. I struggled with the transition. When I reflected on my struggles, it made me better understand what a destructive format email is for workplace communication.
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Technical debt takes many forms
Most people are familiar with “technical debt” in terms of code or architectural problems that slow down development. There are other forms of technical debt, though, that can be overlooked. Dead Code: There are endless “dead code as debt” scenarios. You have a “live” function that is only used...
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High performance, poor morale, and the Niko-niko calendar
I was introduced to Niko-niko calendars by Max Webster at Niko Niko. Basically, they are a way of tracking a team’s mood over time. At the end of the day, team members put in a smile/frown/whatever face indicating their mood. You can see when people were happy or sad...
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Two weeks is the worst sprint length
Mike Cohn over at Mountain Goat Software says this in My Primary Criticism of Scrum: In today’s version of Scrum, many teams have become overly obsessed with being able to say they finished everything they thought they would. This leads those teams to start with the safe approach. Many...
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Japanese vs. Western models of decision making
I was reading a book about The Toyota Way last year (sorry, can’t remember which) and something that stuck with me was a section on Japanese versus Western decision making*. The diagram was something like this: The crux of it is, Japanese companies like Toyota spend more time preparing...
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Everyone should take vacation at the same time
Throughout my career I’ve always seen people struggle with taking vacation. People are too wrapped up in what they’re doing. Managers can’t allow critical people to go missing. There are weeks of trepidation and handover and “I don’t know how to fix that” emails. To a large extent, this...
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Optimize iteration length for feedback
If there is one theme that is weaved through all of Agile’s principles and practices, it is feedback. TDD. Pair programming. Continuous delivery. Stories. Estimation. Reviews. Retrospectives. On-site customers. Feedback comes up against and again. Feedback from code, the team, and users. As I mentioned in my previous post,...
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Should a team be able to abort a sprint?
After my second retrospective on a new project, I unloaded some pretty harsh criticism about what we were building. I felt it was a “solution in search of a problem” and “not high value.” After proposing an alternative and convincing everyone to change direction, our sort-of Product Owner blasted...
