Long live testing! There’s an apparent conflict between the idea of a cross-functional team collaborating together on their work and specialist testers that only do testing. There’s an awful lot wrong with the “them and us” attitude between developers and testers (in both directions) in some organisations. One of the biggest problems in isolating testing…
I was reading some course material recently that was trying to teach people something to do with software development and it was using the same old tired “ATM machine” example. I’ve worked with hundreds of projects, many in the finance sector and none of them are anything like an ATM machine. One of the reasons…
How do we join up business strategy to agile development? Is program management relevant? Where do project managers fit in? What about architecture? Holistic Software Engineering (HSE) answers all of these questions – for free. Agile and continuous flow are great for small teams or a small number of inter-related small teams working on exploratory or maintenance…
I’m a lover of history, a follower of technology old and new, I love the fells of Northern England. My professional life is almost exclusively focused on helping organisations large and small operate more effectively. I’m a coach, mentor, and a listener, thinker and sounding board for ideas. My greatest pleasure is in seeing the…
I’m some way between a tools geek, process geek, (post-)agile geek, psychology geek and programming geek. I work with both private and public sector organisations worldwide to help improve the way software is done. I’m a UK based consultant with over 10 years experience in the software industry enabling teams in the adoption of various…
Death March projects are those projects that everybody has heard about where everyone on the team knows the project is pointless yet all the team members persist despite the feeling of impending doom. The team may make attempts to correct the problem but are usually thwarted in their efforts to change. Death March projects persist…
I’ve been involved in process improvement for around twenty years, I think I’ve had some successes. This is a problem “I think I’ve had some successes” ? Last year, I was having a conversation with my friend and colleague about how we could approach a particularly tricky question, Mike and I were challenged with understanding the performance…
Why not StratDev, BusOps, etc.? The term “DevOps” refers to tight integration between the Software Development and Operations parts of an organization. As I mentioned in my article on Conway’s Law the reinforcement of there being two separate parts “Dev” and “Ops” causes a separation in the way we think about these problems and then how we interact within…
There’s endless debate in the industry around contracting models and which is the best model, to further confuse the subject there’s always a “Yes but” in the mix, over the last 10 years its been “Yes, but what about contracts with agile” before that it was “Yes, but what about contracts with iterative development” In…
We’re often asked the question “How do I quantify value?” For many businesses this is a matter of balancing risks against (Estimated Sales – Cost of Development). It is the quantification of the risk element that poses a problem, but if the potential reward significantly outweighs the cost to develop then the decision to proceed…