Estimating projects, huge ones, seems to be an activity that causes groans and protests. I understand why. Often there’s a tension between accuracy and knowing that they can’t be accurate. When confronted with estimating a large body of work, I emplo...

A recurring theme for my clients is knowledge transfer from one group to another. With these transfers’ regularity, one might expect a certain level of expertise in these transitions, but more often than not, they are full of challenges and surprises...

An article just surfaced on CNN where the top executives of SolarWinds essentially shifted the responsibility of a password leak to an intern. This infuriates me, but I think it serves as an excellent reminder of some hard truths about working for a...

When an idea for a new project gains steam and people gather to decide what exactly it is to do, there are many options to choose from to help with initial scoping. One technique I use quite regularly is known as Impact Mapping.

It winds up for almost everyone that you’ll have more than one job in your career. This is especially true in software development. For myself, I changed jobs nearly every single year! The shortest time I was at a company was five months, and the lon...

Often I wind up working with teams and managers who want to know more about how to get started with automated testing or realize their efforts are backfiring. For the last of those cases, it is almost always because they adopted the ice-cream anti-pa...

There are times throughout my career where I’ve taken an extreme stance on my responsibility as a developer. Ironically this approach was rarely met with accolades until well after the moments passed. So here are some of those stories. As you read th...

There are a number of times in any given project or product development cycle where you might have to consider stopping work. I want to explore some of those ideas and share a story.

I often work with leaders who have a team or several teams of developers and want to trust them but wind up surprised and frustrated when news breaks. This incongruence feels a little hopeless because, on the one hand, they trust the team to take car...

I’ve been in this software game for over a decade now, and yep, still learning. Admittedly I haven’t had to put too much effort into learning new things as the years go on, but I decided to challenge myself by learning something where I have few prev...