Agile coding, agile testing, agile coaching, the agile enterprise, and Network Weaving.
Speculation = Bad Most of the work I do will — at some point — be reviewed by someone for completeness, accuracy, and quality. I will need that feedback. On a team, we often need to incorporate everyone’s great ideas. Again, feedback. Whether work is individual or collaborative, the less work I personally do before [...]
One thing I find repeatedly in dysfunctional software development shops is managers and executives who, instead of encouraging and enabling their staff to form healthy, cohesive, high-function, self-organizing, fulltime project teams or product teams, essentially ask everyone to be part-time members of lots of teams. They micromanage everybody’s workweek, or worse yet, workday. This means [...]
Never Saw a DSL Coming I had some knowledge of DSLs (Domain Specific Languages) thrust upon me recently. And you know what? I rolled with it for awhile. And I’m still rolling. A few months ago a colleague of mine and I at Pillar were tasked with an interesting little proof of concept. We used [...]
I’m trying to meter my rants — to restrict myself to a certain number per, say, 10 blogs. But here comes another one. Here and there in the blogosphere you see folks claiming that the agile software revolution (or evolution, or paradigm shift, or whatever) is somehow over, irrelevant. You see folks claiming that mainstream [...]
Pleasant and unpleasant things occur to us. This is a fundamental Buddhist tenet, but also a pretty obvious fact of life. The older you get, typically, the more obvious it grows. Life is often inconvenient, disappointing, frustrating. On the other end of the pain spectrum, life is sometimes quite painful. It sometimes seems unbearably painful. [...]
Your Heads-Down Cubicle-Dwellers are Mostly Wasting Their Time This one has a “rant” tag, because it’s not a friendly post. I have seen too much pain and needless waste resulting from this problem at various large enterprises. The larger the percentage of their workdays your individual programmers spend heads-down in their cubicles, cranking away on [...]
I really have no excuse for taking this long to join the zillions of bloggers out there. I have some experiences to share, some music, some poetry. And I am a firm believer in the hilariously explosive zillion-to-zillion overpublishing of the blogosphere. Let us all share our gold, our dross! So may I follow through [...]