Whenever I implement cycle-time as a metric, I have to explain that there is a slightly disheartening early phase to the collection of this information. Over the first couple of days, your cycle time will look awesome, but then it gets progressively worse. This can sometimes shock a team, because staring at a graph sometimes […]
There is a general pop-psychology perception that people have a personality type. This has been embedded into the collective mindset over the years thanks to companies using psychometric testing, DISC models, Myers-Briggs types, and Belbin tests to categorise and manage these different personality types. I have been subjected to many of these tests over the […]
I recently attended an event in Manchester, organised by BJSS and Microsoft, on the subject of AI and ML. The schedule was jam packed with interesting insights and useful case studies that got my head buzzing. Having had some time to reflect on everything I absorbed on the day, I have realised that we are […]
When you are using The Pomodoro Technique® there is always a bit of a choice to make about your timer. I started out with a proper mechanical Tomato timer, I tried a phone app for Pomodoro, and I tried just the standard clock app. The mechanical timer had a couple of benefits… one of the […]
This is a quick note about checking trends over time, and why you probably ought to check both a rolling comparison over time and a fixed baseline comparison. Quite often you’ll find a dashboard with a comparison over time shown as a percentage, in either green (good) or red (bad) – or orange if you’re […]
We all know that BizOps is gaining momemntum and that we need to think about how we take care of it in our own organisations. Not just because it’s yet another buzzword ending in “Ops”, but because of what we’ve been piecing together for many years. If you’ve read Start With Why, or The Lean […]
Has you ASP.NET applicaiton reported that minification failed? If you are using bundles in application, you might come across this exception comment at the top of your larger-than-expected bundle file. /* Minification failed. Returning unminified contents. (List of problems here) */ It can happen for JavaScript or CSS, but it means minifier has found something […]
I needed to know how many pictures were being sent in a collection of XML documents, so I wrote a PowerShell script to count the number of picture elements. The element I’m looking for is in the $element_xpath variable. The example below is any picture element, anywhere in the document. You could limit this by […]
When I worked on the technical side of software development, I talked a great deal about #NoEstimates. I’m now on the business side of software development (in charge of all products and data for a global SaaS provider). I thought it would be a good time to revisit estimates and put them in context using […]
Analytics are super-useful but can get a bit tricky at times. For some reason, several of those times seem to have cropped up this week. So, following on from my article on Why Unique Visitors in Analytics Never Adds Up – I now have one about how you can sometimes have more sessions that users. […]