Culture
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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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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Spreading TDD throughout your company
First, the pitch- CCP is looking to hire someone to come to Iceland and teach TDD with Python for a couple days in August. We're looking for someone that's taught TDD before. We already have people who have been doing TDD for a while now and to support it...
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Python Enrichment and PitP
When I was starting my job at CCP, I posted about some things I wanted to do as a lead. I've been through two releases with the Tech Art Group in Iceland (and for the past 6 months or so been the Tech Art Director here) and figured I'd...
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How wide are your interviews?
I’ve been a part of and interviewed at companies where the interview process was not just long but also very wide- people from different teams and departments interview a candidate. (ie, a Microsoft-style interview process) At my current company, our last two Art hires have had a much more...
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How to deal with being a negative developer
There was a recent AltDevBlogADay post about Negative Developers and Team Stability that hit home. It’s not that I think the advice was particularly interesting (good, standard stuff), it’s that it reminded be that I’ve been a negative developer. I don’t know what I could have done differently. I just wasn’t...
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Decisions, decisions
Some people can find me a bit over-earnest in my quest for automation. I’ve finally figured out how to know whether something is worthwhile to automate. Are you making any decisions when you do this? And if someone is making decisions that may be unnecessary: Can we get from...
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Someone has a hat to eat
In December, I made a blog post about being happy. A anonymous (of course) commenter said: Hey Rob. 5 months? Are you really this shortsighted? It’s like watching a kid say he’ll NEVER get tired of THIS toy. Frankly, if you don’t get tired of it you stopped growing....
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Branching strategy is not a remedy for instability
4 years, 5 branching strategies. First we worked all in one branch. Then we became hyper-branched. Then we consolidated into a couple branches. Switched companies. First we were all in one branch. Now we’re splitting into branches. This has all been in Perforce since it is the de-facto SCM...
