The Apprentice (UK). It started out as a show that offered the prize of a job working for Sir (now Lord) Alan Sugar. If you trust in the magic of television, you’ll believe that a series of tasks were devised to test the many skills needed to take on a job in one of the […]
This is not my idea, though I’ve named it the DITE cycle in opposition to other available alternatives. There are lots of organisations and individuals doing something along these lines and they all give it different names. There are echoes of The Lean Startup, flashes of Spotify’s DIBBs, the velvety touch of Impact Mapping, and […]
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 releases 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 […]