How to Invest Less and Make More From Your Software Projects
As the saying goes, “Cash is king.” It doesn’t matter how good your P&L or balance sheet looks or how good the business case for…
Author: Richard Lawrence
Longtime co-owner of Agile For All, Richard left in October 2020 to co-found Humanizing Work.
He trains and coaches people to collaborate more effectively with other people to solve complex, meaningful problems. He draws on a diverse background in software development, engineering, anthropology, and political science. Richard is a Scrum Alliance Certified Enterprise Coach and Certified Scrum Trainer, as well as a certified trainer of the accelerated learning method, Training from the Back of the Room. His book, Behavior-Driven Development with Cucumber, was published by Addison-Wesley in 2019 (for more information, visit bddwithcucumber.com).
The Most Useful Release Burn-up I’ve Seen Yet
I often advise teams against using a release burn-up (or burn-down) chart because I’ve seen too many managers try to use them as a stick…
Trust
Esther Derby has a good post this morning about how trust is embedded in a context. She writes, “The sort of trust that you need…
Kill the Office, or Fix It?
A recent essay in Wired says, “The traditional office, meanwhile, remains a black hole of interruptions, procrastination, and soul-crushing politics. According to Gloria Mark, an…
Surviving Rewrites
It seems like fully half the projects I come across are rewrites in one form or another. It ought to be common knowledge by now…
The Power of Small Experiments
Change can be scary. Change at work is particularly threatening. After all, most of us spend more time working that doing any other single thing.…
How Multitasking Guarantees Low Customer Satisfaction
Two Hours of Waiting, an Hour and a Half of Waste, and a Burrito One day last week, I took what was supposed to be…
Tech work is messed up…and we can fix it
Kathy Sierra tweeted: “The big Q: how much does the *perception* of working in tech need to change, and how much does the *reality* need…
One Word Can Change Your Daily Scrum
In my experience, the daily Scrum serves two purposes: for team members to make and follow up on commitments to one another, and for team…
Benjamin Zander at TED
He says, “…I suddenly realized, the conductor of an orchestra doesn’t make a sound. My picture appears on the front of the CD. But the…
Why TDD Works
Martin Fowler nails it (as he so often does): My point is that we can’t look at testing mechanistically. Unit testing does not improve quality…
Jean Tabaka on “11 Ways Agile Adoptions Fail”
Jean Tabaka, an experienced agile/Scrum coach and trainer, has a good article on Sticky Minds called “11 Ways Agile Adoptions Fail.” I’ve seen most of…
Refactoring Things Other Than Software
Eugene Wallingford asks: In many software circles, refactorings are behavior-preserving modifications that target the patterns of the domain. If we write patterns of management or…
Continuous Integration and the Bad Head Problem
Martin Fowler writes this morning about a problem he sees with the way continuous integration is practiced today: Once you are happy with your work…
I’m presenting at Agile 2007!
I recently found out that my experience report, “XP and Junior Developers: 7 Mistakes (and how to avoid them),” was accepted for the Agile 2007…
Slides and links from my CU ACM chapter presentation
Thanks to all who attended my presentation tonight to the University of Colorado ACM chapter! As promised, you can download my slides here: CU Presentation.pptx…
Wisdom from “The Humble Programmer”
I discovered Edsgar Dijkstra’s 1972 gem, “The Humble Programmer,” today. Some of my favorite quotes… On TDD (before it was called that, of course): Today…
Front Range Code Camp 2007
The website for the 2007 Front Range Code Camp launched today. From the website: “Code Camps are grassroots technical conferences run by local developers for…
I Just Want to Cut
When we pulled into the garage the other day after running some errands, my 6 year old piped up, “Dad, when we get in can…
Continuous Integration in Under an Hour
Last year, I gave a presentation at the Front Range Code Camp titled “Continuous Integration in Under an Hour.” Here’s the abstract: Automating software builds…