All of this content used to be spread over three different blogs at three different domains and it's now been merged into one. Why was it ever three? Because at the time it seemed reasonable that each of them was for a different audiences, and yet over time I've found that the lines between topic areas got blurrier and tended to overlap. So now they're all together in one place.

If you encounter things that seem broken, please let me know and I'll get them fixed.

Browse by topic area:

There's a lot here and if you're not sure where to start, here are some popular starting points. From these, you'll find crosslinks to even more topics. Enjoy!

Controlling emotions

Brain scientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor talks about the 90 second rule for emotions. She describes the chemical release of an emotion only lasting 90 seconds. Effectively that means that if you’re feeling sad or angry, you’re only feeling that for 90 seconds at a time.

Close those bugs

Do you have bugs that have been open for a long time and that are low priority? Cancel them.

What to measure

I frequently talk to clients about metrics, and there is usually an understandable desire to measure too much. “Let’s measure these fifty things everyday so that we know if everything is ok.”

Code coverage revisited

I’ve had several conversations recently with people arguing that mandated code coverage numbers are a positive thing. For example “all code must have 90% code coverage”.

Choice blindness

The excellent book “The Illusionist Brain: The Neuroscience of Magic” talks about an experiment done with supermarket customers, where they were asked to sample and then choose between two different kinds of jam. After that decision was made, they were asked to try the jam they had selected again and then explain why they had selected it.

Jira API: Sprints

If you’re extracting data from a scrum board then at some point, you’ll need to extract sprint data, which is stored in two different places, inconsistently.

Start and end points for flow metrics

If we want to be tracking flow metrics, we need clearly defined start and stop points. When we’re talking at a team level, these are often described as Definition of Ready (DoR) for the start point and Definition of Done (DoD) for the stop point.

Goodharts Law

Goodhart’s Law says that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

The first problem is rarely the problem

Years ago at a client, I recall being asked how they could change the browser timeout to make it longer. They explained that what they were doing was taking too long, the browser was timing out, and users weren’t happy.