Product Software Development is a Marathon

Most people like short things: short tasks, short emails, learn-how-to-program-java-in-24-hours books, lose-weight-in-a-month video guides. Modern society is cursed by impatience and time pressure. Information flows hit us from all sides and we just can’t resist. We spend more and more time on shorter and shorter things. Software development demands focus. You can’t create anything significant...
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Software Development: Specialize or Generalize?

Now here’s a good topic for discussion. Many years ago we were hiring software developers as such. For the most part, they were good at their job, but not all of them.  Me, personally,...
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Faster. Faster. Faster.

I’ve been thinking about  the influences that might affect the team’s velocity recently. Every single product owner wants to have features delivered as soon as possible....
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Flow. Discover Problems and Waste in Kanban – 2 Years Later

Almost 2 years ago I published the Flow. Discover Problems and Waste in Kanban post. The idea was quite simple: visualize the flow of a single user story or bug, and track their life...
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Productive Meetings: 1, 3, many

by Michael Dubakov, 10 May 2011
Agile Teams

Do you know how to run a really productive meeting? I don’t. I’m learning and run meetings with various success so far. Recent insight is related to meeting group size. Let’s...
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5 Reasons Why You Should Stop Estimating User Stories

1. You don’t waste time on estimation Estimation takes time. Even if you do planning poker and use story points, it still takes time. What do you do to improve estimation accuracy?...
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How We Hire Developers

by Michael Dubakov, 29 March 2011
Agile Teams

Hiring is hard. It really is. There are not so many talented and smart developers in the world, but there are lots of inexperienced, boring, exhausted developers. Surprisingly, so many...
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The Lean Team

Why do teams gel? Why some teams are trustful, enthusiastic and passionate; while other teams are apathetic and boring? There is no recipe to build a great team. You can’t add 5 grams...
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Product Development: Frequent Releases vs. Major Releases

Yesterday we had quite a hot discussion about releases schedule in TargetProcess. There are two main options how you can release functionality: Release as soon as something is ready...
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Do Really All Projects Fail Because of Code?

Today I’ve read two interesting posts: The Cost of Code by @unclebobmartin and Code as a Cause of Project Failure by @DocOnDev. They discuss various arguments to prove that all...
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Development Practice: The Ultimate Clean Up Day

We are using Kanban for product development. It works great. As a Product Owner I can re-prioritize backlog anytime and put things into Planned state when I want to. It works. But....
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Development practice: Retrospectives in Kanban

There are various ways to support agile team retrospectives. We’ve used all of them, so let me share our experience. Cadence (usual retrospectives) If you have iterative development...
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10 Most Common Mistakes in Agile Adoption. Part II

In Part I I’ve described 5 mistakes in agile adoption, this part has 5 more. 6. CST Knows Everything Certified Scrum Trainer is not a God. Yes, he knows a lot and has a decent...
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