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 […]
I saw a picture that hinted that DevOps was a substitute or successor for Agile. This made me consider the question “Is DevOps a replacement for Agile?”. It had a chart that represented time from left to right, and suggested that Agile was “waterfall with shorter iterations” and that DevOps was “agile with even shorter […]
This is a balancing post to follow on from work I have done in several teams on estimates. Firstly, I’d like to confirm that in some teams, I have eliminated estimates; and in others I have improved the discipline of estimates. Both are valid approaches in different situations. What I never do is leave dysfunctional […]
Human capacity is hard to understand, so we create metaphors to simplify things. When people talk about capacity, thought-bubbles emerge from the heads of some managers, revealing an interesting problem. They view capacity as a bucket into which you pour liquid-work until it is full. This metaphor for capacity leads to bad outcomes. Work isn’t […]
Back in 1970, Winston Royce made a suggestion for the amount of documentation needed for software development efforts. His influence fifty years later is unquestionable. But there is a problem with numbers (and how time affects them) that I think is missed by many people. Let’s look at the original quote. In order to produce […]
On the 2nd of September 2017, in Middletown USA, Patrick Ponce achieved the world record for solving a Rubik’s Cube by twisting that damn thing into the correct position in 4.69 seconds. He got a certificate for it from Guinness World Records Limited. Rafael Solano commented on this saying: This guy is a great inspiration […]
At the Post Office in the UK, you used to enter the building and scan the room to perform an analysis of the queues. There were a number of open windows housing counter staff, and a queue for each one. A rookie would look for the shortest queue and join the end of it, but […]