Software Best Practices

You have what you believe is an important thought to share with management. You’re concerned though that management may dislike your message. How do you assess how safe it is to share your thought with management? It’s certainly perilous if management regularly scowls, aims their finger at...

Ban whining. It’s destructive communication inside organizations. Why is whining destructive? How can a whiny complaint be transformed into a constructive, actionable proposal? You ask Anthony, who reports to you, “How are things going?” Anthony unloads on you like a dump truck unloading...

…and start solving them. Sounds great, but what does it mean? What’s the difference between managing a problem and solving it? I recently held a workshop on using Scrum to drive process improvement at CIISA 2009 , held in Guadalajara, Mexico, where I focused on using Scrum as a process improvement...

Many teams moving to Scrum have questions about the Product Owner position. Is the Product Owner a member of the Scrum team? What role does the Product Owner play in the day-to-day life of a Scrum project? How do we map current functional roles to Scrum roles, specifically with regard to the Product...

A question was posed on one of the Scrum discussion forums recently about changing the sprint backlog during a sprint. The scenario was as follows: the sprint has been running for 2 days when the Product Owner comes to the daily standup and wants to replace a committed sprint backlog item with one of...

Getting back to the agility cycle ... recall that I started with the business agility cycle and used that to derive the software agility cycle . There isn't a great deal of difference between the first two steps of the business-agility cycle and the software-agility cycle, other than the fact that...

I'm sure I'm not the first person to think it, but I just came across the description of a newly published book whose title made me think about this subject. The book is: Reading Minds and Markets: Minimizing Risk and Maximizing Returns in a Volatile Global Marketplace , by Jack Ablin and Suzanne...

I came across an interesting book in Borders over the weekend, but didn't have the time to browse it more thoroughly. A few hours later, at home, I looked it up on Amazon.com . I found the description and review comments very interesting, and found myself following links to some related books and...

I came across a great quote from Dee Hock in an article at Good2work.com : “Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity...

Hi Luis, So, if I get this right, you are a individual contributor contractor who does not get any say in the development methodology of your client. The client has poor requirement practices especially around managing requirements (traceability, prioritizing). There are a few things you might be able...