"Hardening" sprints considered harmful
Some Scrum teams–whether formally or informally–have a recurring “hardening” sprint after every few regular sprints, in which they fix outstanding defects and make the system actually ready for...
View ArticleHow to Mess Up Scrum, Part 5
This is another item in my ongoing series of “How to Mess Up Scrum.” This time, I turn your attention to… Overcomplicating the Objective Let me give you an example. A few years ago, I was on a Scrum...
View ArticleiTextSharp frustrations
I’ve been working a lot with iTextSharp lately. It’s incredibly useful but also sparsely documented, and the design concept is far from obvious. Here’s what I mean. You don’t instantiate a PdfDocument....
View ArticleHow To Make The Whole Organization Agile – Forbes
Source: How To Make The Whole Organization Agile – Forbes This thing here, from veteran management guy Steve Denning–it’s Forbes, so of course there has to be an infographic that makes less sense than...
View ArticleGetting "on board" with Agile
Someone asked this recently on LinkedIn: What are some good ways in which to most quickly transition from a waterfall environment to an agile environment in such a way that (most) everyone gets on...
View ArticleThe no-iteration iteration
We were stuck. There we were, a few iterations into new product development, and there was still no deliverable. I was getting frustrated because the little bit of work I’d been doing on the GUI slice...
View ArticleAn analogy that might help
We just got hired as a jazz band, which is great. But there’s this one guy who insists on playing drums and only plays marching music. It’s the way he’s always played music and it’s all he knows. He is...
View ArticleLatest buzzword, deconstructed: "Internet of Things."
I’m working on a few “Internet of Things” (IoT) projects for a fairly big manufacturing company right now. Yadda yadda nondisclosure, that’s all I’m going to say about that. A minute ago I saw an...
View ArticleFirst rule of public speaking
I’ve been away from the “tech scene” for a little while. Other priorities got in the way of hanging out with other software people in any organized or ongoing way. And last week was a little sad, as...
View ArticleLegacy Code: Wrap a method
I’m a big fan of Michael Feathers’s book Working Effectively With Legacy Code, and now and then I reread it because there’s always something to refresh or remind me. Right now I’m looking at the “Wrap...
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