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. But First, Why Code Review...

The deadline is approaching and there is still so much to do. Workdays get longer, the rigor that normally applied to design and testing begin to slide in favor of cranking out more features. The technical debt card starts getting swiped. A feature s...

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...

About a decade ago, a book called The Phoenix Project swept through the IT community. It is an incredibly relatable bit of fiction about a software shop that ultimately redeems itself. Most people who read the book came away with the idea that DevOps...

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. $15 turns into $250k I was working with a team who was building a p...

When many companies want to bring about change they primarily train and inform people as to the new behaviors and expectations. What is often unattended is where the lines are where the change is the most disruptive and what needs to happen right on...

I wrote an article last week about the Theory of Constraints. In particular, I highlighted how variability is probably the biggest enemy you have to a method like that working. So in this article, I’m going to explain a way to help reduce variability...

Imagine you are setting off to win an ambitious car race. You assemble a team of folks with plenty of experience and lay out a plan. A simple guiding principle is at the core of your plan—faster is better. You source parts from the places that can ge...

Many people know of things like SOLID, KISS, or DRY as guiding principles for good software, but my favorite is, “Tell, don’t ask.” What is it? In a nutshell, the tell, don’t ask principle is that objects should tell other objects what to do and not...

It was about three years before I saw a retrospective that didn’t have the basic three-column setup. You know, the one where you have +, -, Change. Maybe yours is start, stop, continue. That was seven years ago, and I’d say 95% of the time that three...