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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Last October, I was asked why released of a legacy system were so hit and miss. There were a couple of reasons for the flaky releases, which I have summarised below. When you judge the quality of the metaphors, please bear in mind that these were invented off-the-cuff. Configuration The first reason releases were unreliable […]
After reading a discussion about whether having a dedicated Scrum Master is an effective way of running a team, I got to thinking about what I have experienced in the real world. This is an empirical point I’m about to make; I’ve worked with a good number of organisations, but not enough to get to […]
Risk Management was first made interesting by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister in Waltzing with Bears. If you want to know more about the subject, that’s a good place to start. But what is the difference between Risk Materialisation and Crystallisation? I will answer this question shortly, but let’s start from the beginning! Risk […]
Azure DevOps (previous Visual Studio Team Services, Visual Studio Online, and Team Foundation Server) has many great features. We talk about the features all the time; source control, continuous integration, release management, task boards, reports! One of my favourite features is how it helps us to pass audits. There are two ways to pass an […]
These are the three things I encourage people to look at when they aren’t getting what they need out of their software development process. Because I had started with these so many times, I sometimes imagine everyone knows all about them; but each time I start helping a software team turn things around I find […]
For those reading this in the future, digital video recorders (DVRs) were quite prevalent in 2018. They allow you to record programs that are being broadcast and watch them later. Before DVRs there were other ways to record programs that involved writing them to magnetic tape based on a timer. Before that you just had […]
Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas I have said a thing or two about estimates in the past; and it generally leads to no good. What I do sometimes need to do is clarify my perspective, because people don’t get it. As always, definitions are important – so I’m to clarify what I think of when […]