Scene 1: Tragedy We’re in a retrospective. This was after a major event, so we discussed a few of the things that have gone awry, like delayed integration with other teams, unfinished stories, and then how we’re going to fix them. All in all, a good open discussion. And then, as we’re getting ready to close
To improve we need transparency. We cannot solve problems we don’t see. We can’t improve an invisible process. We need people to speak out about how they feel, how their work is affected. In order to improve, my team needs me to admit I’m late, and not hide I’m working for two weeks, digging a hole, and find out
When I was a young developer, there was a re-org in the company. I found myself a team leader. That is the normal thing in software organizations (and I assume also in others) – you get a promotion because you’re competent enough in your current job. It’s not stupid (although many times with disastrous results),
My natural habitat is an agile software development company. I usually meet with people who are already agile, or aspiring to become agile. And then there are other times, where the “real world” hits me on the head, saying I should leave my little pond for a while, and see what’s really out there. For
So now we’re after the second (and final) part of the management review. The second meeting was different than the first one. On the first one, the PMs were active (in a defensive way, mind you). This time they were more quiet. I know the feeling from past meetings like this: I want out, the
No, it’s not over yet, and we are in preparations for the follow-up meeting. We’ve compiled a few more charts, and fixed a few mistakes, and will be ready to show those, as well discuss the topics we haven’t covered last time. We can dig through these numbers a lot, and pull out a lot
And I presented the different statistics and everyone asked for forgiveness and changed their way immediately. Not. (Did you expect otherwise?) There’s a general feeling that things are not going well (discussing the results with the PMs prior to the meeting helped alleviate “unpleasant” surprises, and everyone knew what’s going to be displayed). The mood
I really like working with smart people. Especially, when I hired them. And that means I like being right. Moving on… Smart people identify bad things and propose changes. They sometimes stubborn to a fault doing that. But that’s OK. The stubborn ones are willing to fight the system, or at least try to prove
Everyone agrees that code review is good for you. We are tracking both how many code reviews were done, and how many bugs we’ve uncovered during the sessions. We’ve been at it since Dec-06, and in April I did a summary to see where we are. The more reviews we do, the more bugs are