In order to become better at selling “doing the right thing” to management, I think we need hard evidence. Therefore, I’m very curious what would happen if you put a really good researcher on digging through the version control system for your product. Combined with bug trackers, continuous integration systems, and other [...]
Great quote from Kent Beck at SDC2010. Multitasking doesn’t work, but it would be so nice if it did that we try anyway. That’s about the best summary of (human) multitasking I’ve heard. This picture is pretty good too, though.
You can’t lead a big company at a detailed level. You simply don’t have enough time to grasp all details. You are just human, and your brain cannot handle the complex lives of all people in your organization. But if you’re the CEO, you still have the responsibility for all of these people. “With great [...]
Reading Richard Dawkins’ book The Greatest Show on Earth, I got inspired by his description about genes. He talks about how genes are not the blueprints of the body, but rather a recipe for the body. In other words, the genes do not contain a complete (or even partial) description of the final result, but [...]
At a lunch recently, I talked with some architects/developers who were a bit concerned about a decision made by the managers and (powerpoint-)architects at their company. The company had decided to go with a middle-ware/database solution from a vendor which I will allow to remain anonymous (let’s just say it’s a very large company who [...]
When I talked to Michael Feathers about why constraints are good, he also mentioned an example of where he thought things were going wrong. Some people who use test-driven development, also use tools that allow the to peek into classes and read private variables. That is an efficient way to ensure that some method altered [...]
This started out as a comment on a Michael Hyatt blog post on the use of social media for marketing vs relationship building. Michael responded to my comment saying, Wow. That a blog post in itself—and a great warning to all us who are tempted to “go pro.” So, consider yourselves warned, everyone. (Now, that [...]
In a conversation with Michael Feathers at SDC2010, he mentioned something which I found very interesting. It was a very simple statement. Constraints are good. To me, that statement sounded rather odd. Constraints is a negative word to me, so intuitively I want to remove constraints. Thus, I asked him to clarify. And here’s what [...]
An time estimation rule of thumb for software development in startups. (Somewhat tongue-in-cheek.) The rule Make a good estimate of the work (in any time unit). Multiply that number by itself in months plus one. What you get is a reasonable estimate for release date (in the original time unit). Examples Some examples: Work estimated [...]
The Bus Factor, as defined by Wikipedia: A software project’s bus factor is a measurement of concentration of information in a single person, or very few people. The bus factor is the total number of key developers who would if incapacitated, as by getting hit by a bus, send the project into such disarray that [...]