Cascading failures

Early in my career, probably 30 years ago, I recall shipping some significant application at a bank. I don’t even remember what the product was but I do remember that management was really worried about things not going well. So we rolled out to a small subset of our customers for a couple of weeks, while developers were on call for the support desk. In the first few days support called regularly and we’d come down and fix the problems right away.

Unconscious mind and negative phrasing

Imagine that you see your child precariously picking up a glass of water and you shout at them “don’t spill that!!”. You know what’s next; water all over the floor.

Scrum Master vs Coach

I was talking to someone who had been asked to be the Scrum Master (SM) for four scrum teams at the same time. My initial reaction was that the manager who had set this up has no understanding of the SM role.

The three legs

When I’m teaching agile classes, one of the first things I talk about are what I think of as the three legs of the table we’re working from.

Visualizing WIP limits

I’ve been wanting to do a good visualization around WIP limits for a while and now I finally have one that I’m happy with. This is specifically around column based WIP limits since that’s all that Jira supports, and pretty much all my clients use that.

Jira API: Knowing if an issue is visible on the board

When we see an item aging unnecessarily in the data, one of the first questions I ask is “is the issue even visible on the board?” If it isn’t then I think we immediately understand why we’re ignoring it. “Out of sight, out of mind” is a very real thing.

Deliberate practice

I frequently give the advice to developers that we should always be leaving the code cleaner than when we arrived. That we should be refactoring aggressively to ensure the the code is in good shape. This usually brings people out who violently disagree with this and argue that we should never refactor without permission or that we should only touch the smallest amount of code to satisfy the new feature, no matter how ugly the system is.

Cumulative flow diagrams (CFD)

For years, I’ve been watching teams show off cumulative flow diagrams as an indication of their progress. Everyone nods their heads and pretends that they understand what they’re looking at, thinking that it must be obvious to everyone else. Except it isn’t.