agile Agility and the power of No One of the nice things for me about writing is I get to go back to my old articles every once in a while and see where my viewpoint has matured, where it's changed...
organisations The 10x Developer and You I'm in the mood for sarcastic graphs. I think (I hope) that the idea of the "10x" developer is not an astonishingly new and radical one. People in the upper quartile
organisations Two Transformation Questions What exactly is a transformation? Is it "go to the cloud" or "be Agile" or "containerise the things"? Despite the number of organisations which state those as
agile The Definition of Done Dashboard I've been working on an infrastructure-heavy project of late, and one of the problems our team faced was differing viewpoints on what "done" actually means. In short, we ended up with
agile Technical User Stories - Who, What and Why One of the problems we regularly face with our more technical stories (for example, setting up a monitoring stack) is explaining to the people in charge of the budget why they should pay
agile Too much in flight In a Scrum context, multitasking is bad. Teams who follow Kanban will be familiar with this concept, as that process invites you to explicitly set your lane limits up front - only 3
agile The Backlog I had one of those "changing the way we work" discussions today, about the product backlog. I'll spare you the details, but it came down to answering two questions: How many
planning Planning isn't free I've got a confession to make: I secretly enjoy rewriting code when requirements change. I get to think again about what I was doing and my assumptions, tidy up the lingering technical debt,
organisations Firefighting Firefighting is one of the biggest and most common causes of lost productivity and morale in software development. It usually manifests as developers being pulled off their project to urgently fix something -
agile Working with both physical and electronic progress boards Yesterday in a retrospective one of my teams asked a question which is all too familiar: "Updating both a physical board and an electronic board to track our progress is a bit
scrum Kaizen and Scrum Kaizen, the process of "improvement" in the Toyota Production System, is a valuable complement to Scrum, based on many of the same principles. It means teams can get effective results both
agile Waste redux A conversation today reminded me of my musings about waste from a couple of months ago. The context being that Scrum is misunderstood more often than it's understood, the relatively broad statements of
agile Agile transformation: The Low A few months into any company's journey towards agile development I often see a point which I call the Low. This is where you've brought in a few experts, and done a few
organisations Bimodal IT isn't anything to aspire to Bimodal IT is a term created by analysis form Gartner, to describe an increasingly common pattern in enterprise development. It's where you have one part of the organisation working in a very traditional,
agile Lean Startup is Agile by another name - and that's okay. There's a lot of buzz building around the Lean Startup model lately; it's been around for a few years but we're starting to see mention of it in places like the WSJ and
organisations Be careful with "Modern Agile". I have a problem with a lot of the recent advice suggesting firms looking to adopt agile practices should eschew the stand-ups, estimations and fixed iterations of Scrum. Which is strange as a
planning Breaking down user stories A user story is a short, simple description of a piece of functionality, as told from the perspective of a customer. It's intended to form the basis for a discussion about how to
agile Avoiding nightmare releases Something I've seen a lot of supposedly Agile teams fail with is releases at the end of a project. Everything up to that point ticks along nicely, but the final sprint is a
organisations That's Not Agile For every 10 companies claiming to have an agile development environment, maybe 1 actually does. This is because "Agile" sounds a lot better than "horrible collection of organisational code smells
