Many organizations I consult with wish they could move faster. These organizations also cite how long it takes to make simple decisions as a huge bottleneck and would love to find ways to remove or expedite the decisions. In fact, when I consult, one...

I was reading old fables to my kid a bit ago and read him The Emperors New Clothes. Two things struck me at the end. First, how little I remembered about the story, and second how strong of analogy it is for what I encounter as I consult in companies...

It is almost universal that you’ll experience a 15-minute daily stand-up meeting every day as a developer. It is nearly as universal that these meetings will take longer than fifteen minutes and fee like a waste of time. Well, that is because most of...

One of the most common practices in software development is a code review. Yet, for many, it’s viewed as slow, awkward, and even confrontational. Groups keep doing it because the shared understanding and opportunity to catch mistakes is worth it. How...

Constraints often feel like a tricky word to understand or do anything about. In this article I want to break down what a constraint is and what some options are for dealing with them. Constraints are Limits When we get right down to it, a constraint...

You have heard, "Change is hard," before. There may even be a personal experience that you have where these words were true. Here are my thoughts on those three words. Learning to Drive Lets imagine you are going to learn to drive a manual transmissi...

If we are using Scrum as the foundation for our agile process, then we have a Product Owner who is out there discovering and prioritizing the things that continually deliver increasing value to the business and it's customers. So, why do they fail to...

Today I’m going to make a few people mad, get a few things that have been bothering me out there, and hopefully, get a few folks to try something a little different. I want to talk about software architects. I do not attempt to hide that I don’t resp...

Everyone loves thinking about all the features their new software product will have, but many other elements need that same level of attention. I am guilty of missing some of these myself or at least putting them off too long. Here is an incomplete l...

Companies have to be careful about the costs that they incur. They have to in order to stay in business. This cost-consciousness, can be described in one of two ways, cost as a concern and cost as a constraint. Imagine there are two development agenc...