Your Kanban board is a waterfall
The Kanban board has become the staple of progress tracking in software development. There's a "To Do" column, various stages of "In progress" and finally a "Done" list. We think…
Minimum viable team
Management worships scaling. More is better. Large teams can churn out more features faster. Strong managers shine in huge hierarchies. Sure, it can be a bit wasteful, but if you…
Office politics for techies
Techies seem to really dislike backchanneling and dealmaking. Mention office politics and the clichés show up. Gossiping and he-said-she-said. Inept managers are promoted. Great solutions are dismissed in favour of…
Pragmatic Software Development
Software developers constantly make trade-offs. Picking an opinionated framework speeds up delivery, but makes it harder to build non-conventional features. Larger payloads vs multiple requests. Does this project benefit from…
Never-ending User Story
How many stories are in your team's backlog? How many items are on the To-Do list? Count them. If you're like most other teams, the answer is: way too many.…
All aboard the Agile shuttle bus
You are a developer in a bank and like most of your colleagues, you struggle with your commute. Management has heard the call and has come up with a solution.…
Software development is a creative job
Software development is a creative job. It's not a pleasant truth to most business people, who'd like more predictability. It doesn't fit in the worldview of most project managers, who'd…
Project Reporter
In once joined a team as a project manager and one of the first things I noticed was the lack of testers. Every team member was a developer and while…
The machine has strong opinions
I've worked in plenty of large enterprisy organisations and one of the most painful recurring themes is employee detachment. We don't talk about it that often, but in an industry…
Why full-time work is not designed for you
Nobody is productive for 8 hours straight and that goes double for creatives. No one can write great code consistently from 9 to 5, day-in-day-out. It's not folding boxes at…