Thanks to Dilbert, developers, engineers and the rest of us managed people, have come to disrespect the “manager”. Ok, it’s not just the comic, some of it was perpetuated by actual managers. Still, there are cases where the managers do the right thing, and the developer messes up. Whenever this occurs, regardless if from the
I’ve gone back to watch Uncle Bob Martin’s presentation “Agile overview” from NDC 2010 (while you’re at it check his “The land that scrum forgot”, the man is such a storyteller!). In the presentation, Bob tells about Winston Royce’s study “Managing the development of large software systems”, from 1970. This article is the origin of
Last week, I had the great pleasure of attending the Agile Practitioner in Israel meeting. Roy Osherove gave a splendid presentation on the “10 mistakes team leaders make” (and if that’s the sample, you better go check the entire course). As the presentation went on, it was evident there’s some division between the crowd and
A couple of comments on my last post (the sad truth about agile planning) made me think: Maybe I was slamming agile planning too much. Then I thought (after an elaborate discussion with myself) – I wasn’t doing that at all! So let’s put some things in perspective: Can I make a plan for the
The latest “my dad is cooler than your dad” in develop-sphere, started with “The Ruby Train Goes Choo-Choo”. Soon enough many have joined the fray on both the Ruby and .Net sides, with the normal people saying: Take a rest. You are not what you program. Of course, the normal people (I’m assuming you, dear
It’s been a few weeks now, for my tenure as product manager at Typemock. Time for a review. What did I learn of becoming the product owner in an agile company? Get yourself a good coach. That may be true for every profession, but especially for the newly initiated, it’s a blessing if you can
In my last post, I warned against the dangers of the craftsmanship movement to itself. The main premise behind this warning is that business and developers don’t speak the same language. And since business has the upper hand, role power, money – business always wins. Martin Fowler’s post, Craftsmanship and the Crevasse, looks at the
I’ve gone from Michael Feathers’ post to Dan North’s post and then to Jason Gorman’s. If I need to choose a side, I’m definitely on Dan North’s side. As I was reading these posts,they seemed familiar. The holy wars and the calls to stop them, the call to better developers to separate themselves from the
The first thought I had, reading about the Skype meltdown last week is: here’s another opportunity to score points for unit testing. Nothing like a a single bug causing so much havoc (or silence, in this case) to get developers attention to the catastrophes waiting to happen. But I decided to go deeper. There are
In my last post “What’s next for Agile?”, I talked about alignment between the development team and the business, from the customer focus perspective. As I was watching “Agile is dead, long live agile” presentation by Jeff Sutherland, from Oredev 2010, I felt I needed to add something. When does agile work? According to Jeff,