The past few years have been weird for most of us, mine included. Still, I thought I’d write a few thoughts down about what 2021 was for me and what I’m considering for 2022.
Almost everywhere does something like Scrum these days or at least is familiar with it. Having said that, if you survey folks—and I have, you’ll find that most regard Scrum with ambivalence or animosity.
Well, it’s 2022, and I took a break from writing for the past few months. It was a mistake, but I’m trying to correct that with this first article of the year.
Often consultants bring a fantasy of co-located teams to their clients. This is a fantasy because companies have been using remote workforces for the entirety of my career, so thinking that will change is silly. In this particular article, I want to...
We’ve all been in meetings that wandered around topics without ever really landing on a defined point or decision. This leaves many people frustrated that there isn’t closure, and when the meeting is over, nobody is sure what they should take from th...
At some point in one’s career in tech, you’ll wind up leading a meeting and need people to take part in some facilitation activity. That might be a retrospective or an activity where you hold a vote. If you’ve ever felt awkward introducing the activi...
Team is one of those words that gets thrown around a lot and sadly often means individuals assigned to work in close proximity. Since I specialize in building teams, I have a very different definition.
The first time I was on a team that abandoned pull-requests and code reviews was back in 2011. I would keep pushing the groups I was in to do the same because the results were much better than the branch-based code reviews.
Tomorrow I’ll formally close on an experiment that I’m willing to call a failure a bit early. Why share all of this? Trying, looking at the results honestly, and moving on is a crucial aspect of building any product.
There are a lot of things to think about when choosing metrics, and most groups tend to get paralyzed debating measures and ultimately measure nothing.