The end result of most Waterfall-style projects looks like this: The middle-to-end period of such projects is usually marked by vicious scope arguments, long hours, lots of bugs and lots of technical debt. Responding to change? Forget about it! One common antidote is to start with an MVP (minimally viable…

Once there was a carpenter who thought his apprentices weren’t smart enough to use hammers properly. So even though he’d buy the best tools on the market: … he’d then forbid the use of certain “unsafe” features, leaving his apprentices with this:

For a while now, I’ve tracked my time-to-first-commit on each new client project. i.e. how long is the time gap between starting on the project, and making my first meaningful commit to the code base? Over the years, this number has varied from a few hours to several weeks. And…

Note: This is the 3rd and final post in a series about how to truly adopt agility. The first post defined the problem pattern, the second post proposed the root cause. In this final post, we propose some ideas that may help. Picking up from the last thread: how do…

Note: This is the 2nd post in a series about how to truly adopt agility. The first post defined the problem pattern. Developers are often encouraged to understand one level deeper than what they’re working at. Don’t just know WCF or Spring; understand how HTTP and REST work. Don’t just…

Our industry is not short on great ideas. Agile, TDD, CI/CD, Lean, XP, Pair programming, DevOps are all great ideas. At the same time, there’s a pattern of failure to adopt these ideas, that we have seen repeatedly. It happened with Agile, is happening now with Lean, and I’m afraid…

Just coming back from the holiday season? Got those back-to-work blues and wishing you had better work-life balance? Well, today I’m asking you to forget the concept of work-life balance. Here’s a better concept for you: the wobble. “The Wobble” idea was taught to me by the wonderful John Humphrey…

I just attended a 1-hour video conference with an Executive Principal at my company, while cradling my newborn infant in my lap, at home, because we’re having a babysitter emergency today. Yes, today I became that BBC dad. Professor Robert Kelly and kids And you know what? It turned out…

Some years ago, I heard Kent Beck at a conference say that he felt tremendous impostor syndrome when he started working at Facebook. “Kent Beck?” I said to myself, “feels impostor syndrome?!!” Made me feel a lot better about my own bouts of dealing with it. Anyway, his latest post on tackling complexity is just brilliant. Please give it a thorough read: What really slows me down is not programming slowly, it is getting overwhelmed, losing my confidence, and not programming at all.