project management
There is no essence of Agile
real agile is: talk to the users directly, know their pain point, address it, repeat. -someone on Twitter who I disagree with In many conversations about Agile, especially as of late, I read something like the above tweet. I don’t know where the idea that Agile can be distilled...
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Results are not the point, followup
In response to a previous post explaining the phrase “Results are not the point“, commenter RenRen Gabás says: Both approaches have their own place. It’s easy to see why Toyota/Lean works well with manufacturing and operations. Continuous service and operations needs continual improvements. However, there are times when you...
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Results are not the point?
The phrase “results are not the point” often confuses people new to Lean thinking. It confused the shit out of me, not having really understood it even after my first few books. This is a shame, because it’s such a simple thing. On Friday night, Danny got really drunk,...
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The “Year of Code” Director is Your Boss
There was some hubbub a few months ago when it was revealed the Executive Director of the UK’s Year of Code initiative can’t code [link]. Not that technical (domain) competency is a sufficient condition for management and leadership, but I’d certainly call it a necessary condition. (I’ll use the...
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Why Agile became meaningless
Uncle Bob recently wrote a post about The True Corruption of Agile. I think it will be a defining post for me because, as I’ll explain in my next post, I’m ready to give up on Agile. It has become meaningless due to the corruption Uncle Bob describes, and...
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What does your Product Owner own?
In a previous post, I came down hard on Agile leaders that don’t program. Now I’ll turn my sights to another part of the Scrum trinity: the Product Owner. I’ll raise some concerns for what I’ve seen it become in videogames, and suggestions for improving how we use the...
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“What did you learn?”
When something bad happens to someone (firing, demotion, bad review, big failure), it’s natural for managers to ask that person “what did you learn?“* Unfortunately the answer is rarely what a manager wants to hear, and it’s also largely useless.** Asking the question phrases it as the employee’s problem,...
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Agile project management versus agile development
I have a saying I like to use when discussing Scrum: Scrum is an Agile project management methodology, not an Agile development methodology. Scrum delivers tools for managing the project (planning, scheduling), but very little for how to develop (design, program, test) it. To do Agile properly, you really...
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Using code metrics effectively
As the lead of a team and then a director for a project, code metrics were very important to me. I talked about using Sonar for code metrics in my previous post. Using metrics gets to the very core of what I believe about software development: Great teams create...
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Using Sonar for static analysis of Python code
I’ve been doing static analysis for a while, first with C# and then with Python. I’ve even made an aborted attempt at a Python static code quality analyzer (pynocle, I won’t link to it because it’s dead). About a year ago we set up Sonar (http://www.sonarqube.org/) to analyze the...
