Archive for November, 2013
The Flawed Project-as-a-Ship Analogy
It is common for a project leader to see his or herself as the captain of a ship. The project is seen as the ship, and the developers are the crew. When storms hit- the project is behind schedule, over-budget, below quality, falling short of projections and expectations- the...
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Spotify’s DNA of Autonomy and Collaboration
Anders Ivarsson, an Agile Coach from Spotify, was kind enough to present his talk from Agile Ísland at our company on Friday morning. It was ostensibly about “scaling agile” but really it was a talk about how they’ve created a culture that prizes autonomy and collaboration. I’m personally tired of...
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A use for killing tasklets
A few weeks ago, I posted about Killing Tasklets, a feature of Stackless Python that allows you to abort a tasklet at any point. And it turns out I had a perfect use case for them just last week and things went swimmingly well. We have a client program...
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Balancing Team Autonomy and Centralized Control
What is a leader on a multi-team Agile project supposed to do when there’s an expectation to make decisions that would bind all teams and for which he or she cannot hope to consider all viewpoints? I often found myself in this position with generally two types of decisions...
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Killing Tasklets
Today at work we had a presentation from the venerable Kristján Valur Jónsson about killing Tasklets in Stackless Python, a technique he and partner-in-crime Matthías Guðmundsson started using for their work on DUST514. As someone who’s done some asynchronous programming, this idea sounded blasphemous. It took a little while to stew but I...
