There is always one meeting that your group has that never seems to go well. For a lot of groups their planning meetings fit this description. After so many poor planning meetings, the group decides they are taking too long, they try to shorten it in...

I have a three-month-old and a four-year-old, and that means I don’t have a lot of time to myself after I come home from work. Most days I only get about two hours to myself, so I have a real need to stay focused and organized, or I’ll never make pro...

I’ve been working on a workshop to help teams and Product Owners understand user stories. One of the topics that very important for this group is sizing and breaking stories down. The classic exercise for this is called Elephant Carpaccio, but I want...

Here’s the situation, you come across some code and you have to start making sense of it. As you read the code you begin to build a mental model of how the pieces work, and then slowly but surely you get enough of it in your head that you see potenti...

Early in my career I made a terrible mistake. One that I think many others have made and will continue to make. I ran a remote retrospective with people I didn’t know well enough. I thought I did. I had talked with everyone privately before the retro...

Testing software isn't a new subject by any means, but that also doesn't mean it's well understood or easy to approach. If you're starting a new project you have the benefit of only needing to test what you create, but if you have an established, leg...

Several years ago, I experimented with a way to improve my productivity. I always felt like I wasn’t getting enough done and that I couldn’t concentrate. What I found was The Pomodoro Technique, and it has helped me with my concentration and producti...

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...

Experienced folks, leaders, and new developers share something in common. They fall in love with a specific technology. This favoritism leads to some fairly pointless debate and, at its worst, some poor decisions. Technology Change Is Constant Over t...

At some point, you’ll be interviewing at a company, and you can immediately tell that the interviewer doesn’t want to be there. They might be frustrated or cold, or annoyed. One way or another, your interviewer is unhappy about interviewing you. What...