Education
So you think you’re following Scrum?
I have a prediction. If you take the Nokia “Scrum Test” you are going to score somewhere less than 7. That means you aren’t doing Scrum, you’re doing “ScrumButt:” A ScrumButt is a sort of like Scrum implementation… but some changes that were too painful have been left out… Companies in this category tend to [...]
Rational Scrum
Recently I tried out a variant on methodology that I’ll dub Rational Scrum. I’ve been trying to put together a few thoughts about the overall process for months, and finally found some time for it. Just as people have specializations, so do processes. Applying one process to all situations is just as wrong as calling [...]
Finding strategic learning funds
Training Industry Times recently published some rather disappointing statistics: Over 92% of surveyed business have experienced pressure to reduce their training budget in 2007. Worse, 56% reported that the pressure to reduce or altogether cut training costs were “significant.” Is this attitude regarding education part-and-parcel of the declining attitude toward education in the United States? [...]
Whole teams
An operational, successful team is more than a set of interchangeable, anonymized skill sets. Would you buy a car that had never been tested in a safety lab? Of course not, and yet the software industry, particularly the commercial industry (as compared to Military, for example) has been ploughing along without whole teams for decades–a trend that seems to be getting more and more negative attention.
The case for certification
I had to read the Agile Alliance’s position on certification a few times before I could decide whether I liked their position or not. Part of this is that the opinion is not that well written. Getting past that, I came away with these core statements: Employers should not require certification. Non-skill-based certification testing procedures [...]
Formal inspections: An introduction
The price of software problems is very high: As much as 50% of development and 100% of all maintenance costs can be attributed to software defects. Often, this price becomes apparent late in the software life cycle—quite often after the software has reached its operational phase (after the software ships)—as previously undetected defects are discovered [...]
Don’t ship broken software
There are two kinds of organizations: Those that ship faulty software, and those that don’t. Unfortunately, trying to change from one that does ship faulty software to one that does not is nearly impossible—in fact, I’ll go so far as to say it doesn’t happen to any significant degree. Yet at the same time, organizations [...]
Navigating the methodology maze
Choosing the right tools to get the job done is time consuming. Development process is not a simple, one-size-fits-all equation. Project teams have a wide array of techniques available to them — but it’s important to remember that its the project, not the manager, that chooses the methodology. Understanding the sometimes subtle and not so subtle variations between methodologies is critical. Choosing a methodology that works for the team and accommodates project needs is, at best, tricky. (Reposted from my original article.)
Mission impossible — the art of choosing the right project
How do you know when right is right? Being careful in choosing “what’s next” isn’t always easy… but it always has long-term consequences. (Reposted from my original article.)
Organizational evolution
A little while ago I started a topic on “Why smart people defend bad ideas.” After some of my recent work touched closely on similar topics I felt the urge to put down ink and revisit the whole subject in more depth. Scott Berkun brings up some good points that are all too often at the [...]
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