Tuckman model of team development

I was once called in to help a team, six months into a three month project. Yes, you read that correctly. It was supposed to be a three month project and after six months they had lots of code but nothing that actually worked, and no end in sight.

Too many branches

Most companies have too many active branches in their code repositories. “Active” meaning we’re doing actual development on them.

Monte Carlo under the covers

Monte Carlo forecasting is the most common form of probabilistic forecasting that we see. It’s compelling because it can provide a highly accurate forecast of when work will be done, with relatively little effort.

Playful learning with LEGO

Last week at Agile Open Canada, I brought out the LEGO again, to illustrate technical practices. While there is so much we can do effectively remotely, there are some things that really do benefit from being together in the same room, and this is one of them.

What is Probabilistic Forecasting?

Do your customers ever ask “When will it be done?” When dealing with the future, there’s almost never an accurate deterministic answer (Tuesday, exactly at 3:45pm) to that question but there is an accurate probabilistic answer (85% chance of completion on or before October 1) and in most cases, it’s a lot easier to calculate than you’d expect.

Test driving prime factors in Go / Testify

This article will show how to “test drive” the prime factors kata in Go with Testify. Testing in Go is built right in, which is great. It’s a very bare-bones implementation though so adding Testify to the mix makes it a lot easier to write your tests.

How often do we run our tests?

Today, automated tests1 are fairly ubiquitous in software projects. That is, almost every project has a large number of automated tests and that they tend to get run by some continuous integration (CI) server.

  1. More precisely, what we’re talking about are automated checks, not tests, but the agile community has never adjusted to using the more precise language so I’m going to keep calling them tests here. ↩

Improvements in CSS: Dark mode and CSS variables

Ryan and I started working on dark mode support for jirametrics and have discovered that CSS now has much better support for this sort of thing than it’s ever had in the past. Specifically, the latest versions of all the main browsers, now support dark mode directly, as well as CSS variables, which simplifies much of the configuration.

Ladder of Leadership

Sometimes our people aren’t taking initiative in the way we hope they will. This could be due to an issue of motivation or a lack of safety or more generally a system that discourages that initiative in some way. Whatever the reason might be, we need a way to change the conditions to get the result we want.