Wednesday, August 11, 2010
People who manage purely by revenue or share price generally shaft their companies in the medium term. Bob Lewis, of IT Catalysts, is always worth a read and has many insights which I think all developers and architects should pay attention to. So you improve fulfillment (improved quality) and customer service (reduced cycle time). Revenue [...]
Many of us hear this phrase in our workplace. When you hear it, what you’re really being told is that the company is afflicted with one or more of the following: is afraid of change not interested in improvement has a rigid top-down process development style doesn’t care what you think I think the greatest [...]
Oh … now I get it, courtesy of Errol Morris, who made the Oscar winning documentary Fog Of War, among many other excellent films, who explains in this New York Times interview with David Dunning (part 1): DAVID DUNNING: Well, my specialty is decision-making. How well do people make the decisions they have to make [...]
Its very common for software developers to be asked to build some software that is a straight port of an old software package, or to faithfully model (i.e. completely identical to) an existing process that the customer has. This is a huge mistake – try to avoid these projects. I hold that if the customer [...]
Every now and again we get some customers who expect that they can get a custom website, portal, or services integration done by looking at a vendor’s “out of the box” experience. This can be very frustrating for us, as we need to get into their heads that no platform will delivery any website, portal, [...]
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Coder Friendly’s got an interesting article about Agile Evangelism. First I’m not going to take issue with the article itself but something that he quotes from DanC’s Lost Garden on Managing Complexity: The repetative (sic) steps that a single worker performs on an assembly line is a good example of a simple task This is [...]
Johanna Rothman on agile adoption for the organisation: Agile requires the discipline to move projects through teams. Multitasking is nuts in agile. Moving team members around to have the “best” specialist available for a particular team is nuts. Performance reviews for individuals is nuts. Managers have to change everything they do, if they want to [...]
Once, the CEO told the software team I was in working on in regards to a proposed feature … “Basically the feature’s ROI has to beat the cash rate. If I can get a better return by leaving this million dollars on deposit at the bank then I owe it to my shareholders to do [...]
Yes, it’s true. Oracle and Sun have both announced the marriage. Techcrunch has the full press release. ZDnet some other commentary. A few people seem to be sweating about MySQL. It would not be stressing about MySQL too much. It could get spun off, who knows. It’s even possible, as some commenters on Techcrunch say, [...]
What’s the problem with reporting the amount of work we’ve completed the last iteration in story points? Story points are a somewhat arbitrary, but consistent measure of the technical complexity to implement a feature. But that’s not the problem with reporting them to management. The thing is, it’s not what management are interested in. Consider [...]