Too many senior devs
A customer I once worked for took pride in a simple yet baffling policy: "We only hire senior developers" Their line of reasoning was that they could afford to pay…
New year, old stack
Attracting software developers remains a hot topic. There is no easy solution and in some cases, it can really block the growth of your organisation. I was talking with a…
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…