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
Technical 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
The Problem With Design
Somehow, some people have gotten the idea that design is somehow inimical to Agile. That’s not true. It’s always helpful to think about things before you do them. The question is not whether or not you should think in advance, it’s how far in advance should the thinking occur. Hours? Days? Months? The problem with…Read More