When people first try scrum, or TDD (or any new process), they feel uncomfortable. We “know how to do” stuff, but then we’re asked to try on something new. Then our comfort zone alarm goes off. We feel constrained. Scrum puts limit on sprints, so we’ll need to actually help the testers finish testing our story.
When on the Scrum Master Podcast, I was asked a very important question: How do I get a systemic view of the organization. This is worth going deeply into. Let’s start with why this view is valuable. The more I work with teams, I find there’s a limit of change I can make. Or, rather, they can
This post, moved to Everyday Unit Testing for economic reasons. Check it out! Image source: http://marketingbones.com/understanding-economics/
I used to be Superman. I could do anything I wanted, and no one would tell me I’m wrong. For good reason: I usually wasn’t wrong. I wasn’t born Superman. I worked hard at it. I learned a lot. I was leading by example. And when I was the smartest guy around, who actually accomplished
Posts about agile dying or becoming irrelevant come and go. God knows I’ve contributed to that movement. The latest wave started with Agile Manifesto signatory Dave Thomas, with “Agile is dead, long live Agility”. The discussion later continued on Twitter and the XP mailing list under the title “Taking agile back”. Taking it from whom?
Uncle Bob Martin recently blogged about the hordes of untrained developers coming into the industry, which eventually leads to some huge software disasters. James Bach wrote about the failures of HealthCare.gov that stemmed from incompetence in software management. These are very good articles, that make you think: Should software professionals (developers, testers, managers) be regulated?
Jason Gorman describes (in a very nice manner) how software courses are lowering the bar. It’s up to us to keep the bar higher. I agree completely. Yet what happens with scrum certification in the last years, has started long before. We’d like to think of software as a craft and development as a skill.
Last time I’ve analyzed the manager’s job at a regular company. I looked at what responsibilities the manager has, and what can be delegated to the team. If enough people see through that, we’ll have a revolution in management. Obviously, we’re not there yet. A pyramid scheme How many flat organizations do you know? And
I was reading Lior Friedman’s post about the agile research. He raises an interesting question: Why are agile studies coming from the exact science fields? After all, we don’t see groups of accountants doing a stand-up meeting every morning. The easy answer of course, that’s where they practiced mostly. We tend to look under the
When software projects fail, we grow the divide between business and development. Let’s analyze a bit, shall we? Why is the divide growing? The divide is basically a metaphor for trust. Mostly, the two sides don’t trust, or sometimes understand, each other. Their goals don’t coincide, and are not communicated correctly. Add to that some