Archive for the ‘teamwork’ Category

Dialogue based dictatorship

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 ...

Thoughts on Program Managers

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, ...

Company self-examination

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 ...

3 More Industry Problems

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 ...

Limit Work to Capacity

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 ...

No Scrum, No More

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 ...

Notes on Continuous Deployment

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 ...

Quality and speed. A primer in team design.

Friday, January 8th, 2010

How you design your team has a great deal to say for the speed and quality of the resulting work the team will do. Speed The ultimate ideal for speed is a one-man show. There's this one guy doing everything in the project. He is competent in engineering practices such as software design, ...