agile Servant Leader, Helicopter Parent Why is developing software so slow now?Provocative statement, so let's unpick. Maybe I'm getting more impatient as I get older, but the pace of modern software development feels glacial. Honestly, why do
teams Interviewing by Teaching I've been trialling a new technique in interviews recently, and the results so far have been good so it feels worth sharing.Essentially it's a refinement of the "try to make the interview
teams Mentoring, not hiring: The Reality Semi-anonymous Internet idiots like me love telling you all these things you should be doing about team structure, organisational approach and Really Exciting Technology but we're often a bit light on what happens
teams How to really identify a 10x developer The sudden trending of "hashtag 10x developer" worries me. It worries me because it's not really about 10x performance, at least most of the time I've seen it. Instead, it tends to bundle two often overlapping movements which are unrelated to performance.
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
teams Thoughts on Interviewing I think I'm destined to always be an iconoclast when it comes to interviews. Not quite so much as the days when "let's ask programmers some questions about programming" was a
teams Thoughts on team leadership and metrics I realise that in four or so years of this site I've never talked properly about team leadership, which is a bit of an omission given how much time I've devoted to organisational
development How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Uncertainty Data/object anti-symmetry broke me. The reason for this breakage was established a year or two ago. I had the fortune to work with some very smart people, who were very good at
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
teams Performance Reviews I had an interesting conversation last night about that old bugbear, the annual performance review. No matter how many well-meaning attempts have been made with SMART targets or peer review systems, every annual
organisations Bias for action and agility What has linked all of the high-performing teams and organisations I've worked for or with? That title is a bit of a clue: it's a bias for action. What this means is they
teams Bad Team Leads and Responsible Adults Does a team need a team lead? I've been thinking quite a bit about flat team structures over the past couple of weeks. As is often the case, it's recruitment-driven. I'm going to
career What is a Technical Architect anyway? I spent a fair chunk of my career being a technical architect, most of which I also spent dreading the inevitable, "so what do you do for a living?" question at
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
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 Waste What's the difference between a merely good Scrum organisation and a great one? The answer is waste. Waste in a Scrum context is loosely defined as any activity which does not result in
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
teams JFDI Deployment One of the things which small and startup companies often do so much better than large, established ones is encapsulated in this four-letter acronym: JFDI. Just Fearlessly Do It. (You can exchange your
development Repeating yourself I think all good developers are aware of the basic axiom of "don't repeat yourself" - avoiding writing similar code over and over by making the effort to design and refactor
development No (more) heroes A good development team has no heroes. There are three common "heroic" feats in software development: Hacking in features in a fraction of the time it should have taken. Pulling all-night
teams Why startups are fun Working for a good tech startup is fun. There's a lot of energy, a certain amount of chaos, a huge amount of work produced and a general atmosphere of people enjoying themselves at
teams Ownership: Technical Debt Hands up who didn't see this one coming? Technical debt is one of those strangely taboo subjects in the development world. Everybody has it, but nobody wants to talk about it when it
architecture Ownership: Architecture I talked yesterday about what happens when development teams lose ownership of the software requirements. In that, I mentioned that teams need to own their architecture and technology stack. Surely this is so
teams Painting by numbers I'm a real fan of estimating things by doing relative sizing with planning poker cards. The cards mean everyone gets a say, the Fibonacci-like number sequence of the deck avoids getting bogged down
