Last week I was contacted by a man who wanted me to help his company write better requirements specifications. I suggested that writing better specifications probably would not help, but that there were other things they should try. This was … Continue reading →
So agile is dead or dying you say. I think you are right as long as it is the label itself you are talking about. Everyone claims to be agile and everything is described as agile. But who cares? The … Continue reading →
So, the big debate about agile culture versus agile practices is raging. First Allen Holub wrote a blog entitled The Agile Holocracy. Andrew Binstock followed up with The Corruption of Agile. Uncle Bob then countered with The True Corruption of … Continue reading →
When I introduced the concept of competence debt I assumed it was an intuitive idea. The discussion since then has proved me wrong. This post is an attempt to explain competence debt more clearly and show how it mirrors technical … Continue reading →
Having just posted my thoughts on #CompetenceDebt: The other kind of software debt and enjoying a lot of positive feedback I was excited when Donald Reinertsen posted his thoughts on Technical debt: Adding Math to the Metaphor. Like Reinertsen, I … Continue reading →
Inspect and adapt is a beautifully simple concept. Start with a process and introspect to find areas where things are not optimal. Test remedies for the problems you uncover to see if they improve things. Repeat. In theory you can … Continue reading →
My friend Johannes Brodwall recently pointed me to a short video by Alistair Cockburn called: Core scrum, barnacles, rumors and hearsay. Alistair uses the elegant analogy of barnacles to describe all the things that have latched on to Scrum over … Continue reading →
A couple of years ago I ranted about the way that people have created a religion around Deming and take his statements as absolute facts. In particular the statement Deming made about the importance of the system versus the people irked … Continue reading →
If you think about it there are only two fundamental approaches to solving a problem. Either you plan how to solve it first and then try to follow this plan or you just jump in and start solving the problem … Continue reading →
David Andersen used his Meetup talk i Oslo last week to describe a start-up’s journey from Scrum to a more Kanban based way of doing things. I seldom work with start-ups, but David’s talk resonated with my experiences in contexts … Continue reading →