One Sunday morning in December of 2015 I caught part of an interview with Adam Grant on On Being. I wasn’t familiar with Adam Grant before this, but I’m extremely glad that I caught the show. I soon got a copy of Give and Take by Adam Grant and I…

There are many paths to a successful software project, but Agile software development always felt intuitive to me. Developing software incrementally, in close collaboration with the customer is the obvious way to deal with the uncertainty inherent in both software requirements and implementation. The technical practices of automating necessary but…

Understanding what customers need is hard, and there is often a difference between the surface “want” and the real problem. A few years ago I came across a short video in which a parent is faced with answering a unexpected question posed by her young child. I found this video…

For many teams the reasons and mechanisms for estimation are aways a work in progress, and I thought that would be useful to revisit a few Techwell articles where I’ve explored the role of estimation in an agile process. In the first article I discussed how teams balance the cost…

Testing is valuable as it can save time, money, and embarrassment. While tests that cover “complex” scenarios are important, we can underestimate the value of testing seemingly trivial scenarios. In particular, validating configuration elements via simple parsing tests can be both simple, and very valuable. When I mention the idea…

One of the great things about being a parent is that you have an excuse to re-read some classic books. When my son was five years old, he and I read The Little Prince. The story of the Lamp Lighter brought to mind a common problem teams have with organizational…

Many of us have likely found ourselves in quite a few conversations about social and political issues, both in person, and on Facebook and other social media. In many conversations I had,I learned a lot, both about my views and contrary ones even when I was engaging with someone with…

The group of people huddled together in a room “until the job is done” is often used as a demonstration of virtues like “diligence” and “commitment.” And these scenes are often the stuff of dramatic moments in popular culture. We rarely, if ever, see any effusive praise for the well-run…

Engineering practices such as Continuous Integration, Refactoring, and Unit Testing are key to the success of agile projects, and you need to develop and maintain some infrastructure to maintain these engineering practices. Some teams struggle with how to fit work that supports agile infrastructure into an agile planning process, and…