Experimentation is a powerful learning tool. When I was young, I performed scientific experiments by mixing chemicals together to see what they would do. I learned that most random concoctions from my chemistry set would make a brown liquid that was often hard to clean out of a test tube. I learned that sometimes they would create very smelly brown liquids. These were not really experiments, however,...
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There have been some web posts and twitter comments lately that suggest some people have a very narrow view of what techniques constitute an estimate. I take a larger view, that any...
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Adding a new team member to an existing team always introduces challenges. The introduction changes the makeup of the team, and if the team had jelled, it has to do so, again, with...
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A common question heard in companies that produce software, either for in-house use or for sale, is “When will this software be done?” I’ve observed this question being asked...
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I’m working with a client that has multiple, non-collocated component teams working on one project. It’s not my ideal situation, but we’re making the best we can of...
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In my experience, Agile projects almost never have a single milestone at the end. The business wants to see multiple milestones along the way, taking internal releases from the development...
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A lot of people and organizations, when transitioning from a serial software development lifecycle toward an Agile one, fall into the pattern of mini-waterfalls. They start doing iterations,...
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I’ve talked about the goals of a retrospective. Now I’d like to talk about four principles of effective retrospectives. I generally find that principles help me more to...
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Seen on Twitter
“Most people doing Agile today are actually doing Waterfall with Agile terms. Agile is dead.”
There are a lot of people talking about “post-agile”...
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I was talking recently with a friend about separate retrospectives for sub-groups. They were worried about thing devolving into separate silos, with a retrospective for programmers,...
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One of the most exhilarating moments in my coaching career was when I entered the client team room one Monday morning to find they were pulling the cards and tape off of their backlog...
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An article in USA Today (December 12, 2012) about highway projects in New York has the sub-head, “Design errors, planning lapses drove up costs more than 14%.” Among the...
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Many organizations segregate their programmers and testers in order to achieve independent validation of requirements. If the system is tested according to an independent interpretation...
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Whether we’re talking about revolutionary new web services, IT systems to automate internal procedures, or products to sell in boxes, there are many different sorts of things that...
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I’ve talked about The Importance of Precise Estimates. In that post, I said,
My advice is to
measure your progress
watch the trends
project the trends tentatively into the...
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My good friend Jack Ganssle commented over at EETimes (also available on the TechOnline India site, with different comments) about my recent post on process standards. In it, Jack...
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There’s been a long discussion on one of the mailing lists about software development process standards. Someone quoted Robert Glass from his essay “A New Way of Looking at Software...
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