If you are estimating work, the chances are that you are on a gradual philosophical journey that starts with time-based estimates. Estimating how many hours, days, weeks and months a task will take is what I like to call “novice estimating”. Almost everyone knows how long these units of measurement are, which makes them very […]
So the famous story goes that a chicken and a pig decide to open a restaurant and the chicken suggests to the pig that they call their establishment “Ham and Eggs”. The pig responds, “That would mean I would be committed but you would just be involved.” Cue canned-laughter and widespread adoption of chicken and […]
In an Agile software development area you’ll usually find lots of information in prominent places about the status of builds and tests. Whether it is a big screen acting as an information radiator that highlights a problem as soon as a build breaks or whether it is a siren and flashing lights that alerts everyone […]
Although Agile can start anywhere in an organisation, very often it starts somewhere near programmers. Very often it will be a programmer who has had prior exposure to Agile or a development team who introduces the process or framework. There is a hidden danger in this that is often overlooked. As a programmer, I find […]
This article explains how using TFS for Agile can result in some really bad behaviours. This is not an attack on TFS; I believe it can be used effectively at all stages of the Agile process and feels more joined up than using one tool to manage a backlog, another to track bugs, yet another […]
I love Pomodoro technique® – it’s like a personal version of Agile. Not only do I love it, but I have used it to great effect and shared with others how to use it. When I first started using it, I made a few Pomodoro mistakes and as they are sometimes the best way to […]
If you have a background in a “traditional” software development methodology, such as Waterfall, you probably won’t have come across the concept of self-organising teams. I know development managers and project managers who baulk at the very phrase, but actually it makes a lot of sense when you think of it in different terms. The […]
If you are a programmer, you will know that context switching is the process of dehydrating and rehydrating the state of a CPU in order to allow it to run more than one process. Simplistically speaking, it allows you to run more than one program when you only have one CPU. If you are old […]
Here are the notes from my presentation “Pomodoro Technique in 25 Minutes”, from 22nd March 2012, which was delivered within the time limit, including questions. What Is Pomodoro? Developed by Francesco Cirillo in the 1980s A tool to manage time and more importantly to manage interruptions and keep focus How Does It Work? Choose a […]
This is a brief report into how the methodologies I use in my day job as a programmer have affected the way I perform household duties. I used to do a lot of housework when I lived on my own and before I actually started writing software for a living and while performing some chores […]