Archive for the ‘process’ Category
Sunday, February 19th, 2012
We're planning some major improvements to how our products are used. It so happened that one project triggered the other, and we're left with about 6-9 projects (depending on how you group them) that needs to be coordinated in order to achieve the aims.
Coordination takes time from developers, so we ...
Posted in process, software, software design, teamwork | No Comments »
Friday, December 9th, 2011
A good program manager (PM) is imperative for making really good software products.
In Toyota, they have this role of Chief Engineer. For those who don't know, Toyota has been the fastest growing car company most of the time since the 1950's, and apart from having technical excellence in their product, ...
Posted in process, teamwork | No Comments »
Saturday, February 19th, 2011
This week we gathered the entire company (first time, ever) for a couple of strategy sessions. We ended up doing a lot of reflective exercises, talking a lot about how we work. Below are the results.
Identifying our own weaknesses
Reflections were very open hearted, which made it a very useful exercise.
Not ...
Posted in process, teamwork | 2 Comments »
Sunday, October 31st, 2010
Today I read an excellent and, as always, emotional journal paper by Tom Gilb -- the measure guy of software -- entitled "What's Wrong with Requirements Specifications? An Analysis of the Fundamental Failings of Conventional Thinking about Software Requirements, and Some Suggestions for Getting it Right". (Download PDF)
It got me ...
Posted in process, teamwork | 5 Comments »
Thursday, April 22nd, 2010
Hard work does not pay off. At least not if your ultimate goal is to improve at what you do. And not if what you do is quality product development.
In that case you need to build in slack for learning into the system. You want everyone to have time for ...
Posted in Monday School, process, teamwork | No Comments »
Thursday, February 11th, 2010
After listening to Olve Maudal at the Lean Meetup in Oslo yesterday, and after reading some of his tweets today (@olvemaudal) I realized that we never informed our readers that we are not doing Scrum anymore. I don't think we have for 9 months or more. We ...
Posted in process, teamwork | 23 Comments »
Thursday, January 21st, 2010
Scenario: A customer has a problem with your software. His questions makes you think and you get an idea for a feature improvement. A good one! Act on it.
Plan it
Code it
Test it
Commit it
Deploy it
Nothing out of the ordinary, it seems. The seemingly new thing about continuous deployment is that we ...
Posted in process, teamwork | 2 Comments »
Saturday, January 16th, 2010
Defining what great software is, is not a complex endeavor. I prefer to boil it down into two distinct characteristics.
a) Ease of Use
The software solution walks you gently through the process of solving your problems as intended. No distractions, no unnecessary decisions to make, no confusions, always heading towards the ...
Posted in process, software | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
I am a sucker for rationale. I've been struggling with rationale on the Extreme Programming (XP)-practice of pair programming for quite some time. What at first looks like one person writing code, and the other one watching, has admittedly been very counter intuitive to me. Let me share my current ...
Posted in coding, process | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
The Software Management Manifesto *)
You have the right to an overall plan. The team should tell you what they could accomplish in the next year or two, and tell you how much that would cost.
You have the right to see progress. From the very beginning of the project, the team ...
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