Jira’s Start Standup Button

For a while now, I’ve been noticing a “start standup” button at the top of Jira boards and I’ve been wondering what it did. Today I pushed that button in the hope that it would do something to help make the standup more effective, and now I wish I hadn’t.

Explaining technical work in business terms

IT people are notoriously bad at explaining technology issues in business terms. So it should be no surprise when the people funding the projects don’t want to spend money on things that sound like gibberish to them. There are real product gaps that they want fixed and they have no time for “cleaning up technical debt” or “doing automation” or “upgrading framework X to version 2”.

Eisenhower Matrix

Sometimes a new piece of work will arrive and it’s not immediately obvious whether we should start it now or if it can wait. A quick triaging technique that I use is called the Eisenhower Matrix1, an approach I first learned from Steven Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

  1. Former US President Dwight Eisenhower developed the ideas behind this tool, and used them extensively in his work with the military and later in his role as president. ↩

Mob mentality podcast

I was interviewed on the latest Mob Mentality Show, a podcast devoted to mob programming, also known as ensemble work or software teaming.

Only one ticket per work item

We should only have one ticket on the board for any given piece of work. This should be obvious and yet I see this problem on a regular basis.

Basic Flow Metrics

Flow metrics tell us about the activity in the system; how well is the work flowing. These are often the first metrics that I consider when trying to improve a system. I start here partially because these metrics are easier to collect than many others, and because I can still make many effective decisions based on just this.

Survivor Bias

“Survivor bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not. This can lead to incorrect conclusions because of incomplete data.”
— Wikipedia”

Cognitive Bias

It would be easy to think that all cognitive bias is a bad thing. When we hear people talking about it, it’s often in the context of the collection of biases that make up racism or sexism or other generally negative things. Yet, the truth is that cognitive bias is the way that our brain manages energy use and is overwhelmingly a positive thing for us.