I’ve found myself talking a lot about focus at the moment. As one of the five scrum values I use it a lot when coaching teams and to a certain degree focus is a really easy value to get started with. It’s easy for teams to lose focus and frequently leaders in organisations are culpable […]
Code reviews: The worlds best defect removal tool
Code reviews have long been documented as one of the best techniques for ensuring code quality and have been cited as far back as the 90’s in seminal works such as Steve McConnell’s “Code Complete” as the go to technique. Code reviews are so powerful that this then led to the pair programming movement, by […]
It’s impossible to win a game with 11 goal keepers
Balance is the key to every team
Lessons from Morbid & Mortality Conferences: 5 ways to improve retrospectives
Hold a retrospective, Make it confidential, Be self critical, Hold it frequently, Drive improvement
Open plan, its a trap!
What ever happen to caves and common? Way back in a time before iPhones my team at Logica transitioned to Extreme Programming. One of the ideas that we implemented at the time was the idea of separating the work space into zones. One zone for collaboration and pair programming and another for solo private work, […]
Building without nails
I really love this short documentary about traditional Japanese carpentry and without getting all mystical and Zen I believe there are some great lessons for us all. Specifically I’m going to pick on people working in the software industry. A poignant moment in the documentary is when we see the craftsmen sharpening their tools and the narrator […]
Bystander effect
On Monday March 22, 1998, Larry Froistad posted a message in a chat room used as a support group for people battling alcoholism. In his message, he confessed to purposely getting drunk and setting his house on fire thus killing his daughter. More than 200 people were online to see the message. Many were outraged […]
Servant Leadership
The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first