Estimating is hard. Estimating well or even remotely accurately, is really hard. There are some tried-and-true mistakes that I’ve seen many teams make over the years that can hurt morale and efficacy of estimating and planning. Many of these I’ve learned from professional Agile coaches and mentors: Avoid dithering over…

Well, maybe useful again would be a start. If you’re like me, GitHub notifications ceased to be a useful feature somewhere shortly after launch. I’ve amended my “watching” habits (and settings) multiple times to try to make them more useful, but sending me even MOAR email is not the best…

I recently attended The Lead Dev conference in NYC and saw Jason Lengstorf give a talk on the dangers of “Rockstar Developers” to your team, presumably from his own first-hand experience. Here’s my longer version. In 2007 I was a freelance software developer who knew practically nothing about running a…

An article recently made the rounds at work, Reality-Driven Development by Barry Jones, that I made a long thread of comments regarding. I recommend reading his first. I’m going to comment on my experience with Kanban and Scrum and where I feel the strengths and weaknesses lie with each. On Boards and Backlogs A…

I was recently posed an interesting question: “What are the different kind of (software) engineers that you’ve worked with?” How do you distill 15 years of working with college-educated and self-taught software developers into a few descriptive categories? Well, here are some thoughts… Worker Bees — of which I am…