Building A Clearboard
Every time I teach a remote class from my home office, somebody says “oooh, where’d you get that clear whiteboard.” White boards are just ugly, and I wanted something that would essentially disappear into the room, so glass seemed like the best choice. Though I see these in many detective shows on PBS :-), I…Read More
Adapting #Accelerate to Development
Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organization is one one the best books to hit the shelves in a long time. Nicole Forsgren, and her co-authors, Jez Humble and Gene Kim have done the industry a huge service by providing a data-focused way of analyzing and improving performance that’s based on real research, not…Read More
Getting Started with Agility: Essential Reading
As is the case with many of the people who actually know what they’re talking about, I’ve come to shudder when I hear the word “Agile,” at least until I can figure whether the person who uttered the word actually knows what they’ve just said. More often than not, they don’t. The word Agile has…
Read MoreTechnical Debt
The notion of technical debt is not well understood, so let’s start there. Agile is all about fast feedback loops—hours or, at most, a couple days. Deliberately lengthening your feedback loop in pursuit of the chimera of perfection destroys your agility. The cost of that delay is a real cost. It usually exceeds development costs…Read More
Individual Performance Appraisals, Just Say No!
For some reason, the notion of individual performance reviews comes up a lot. My general feeling is that we should dump them entirely. I’m actually in good company. Almost a third of U.S. companies are dropping individual reviews, including stodgy places like General Electric. (See this HBR article if you can get past their paywall.…Read More