Motivation & Self-Determination Theory

We tend to over-simplify motivation into just two buckets: intrinsic and extrinsic. According to Self-Determination Theory (SDT)¹, there are in fact six kinds of motivation² and it’s worth considering the full range.

1. Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness by Ryan & Deci, 2018 ↩

2. SDT is a much larger model that encompasses more than just motivation. This chart is one part of the Organismic Integration Theory, that is is turn just one of six mini-theories contained within SDT. ↩

Keeping people busy

The Kanban Guide talks about optimizing the workflow for three different attributes: effectiveness, efficiency, and predictability. It talks about the fact that any optimizations we perform will be a balance across these three and that over-optimizing on one may make the others worse.

SAFETY model of psychological safety

When discussing psychological safety, we like to use the SAFETY¹ model from the Academy of Brain-based Leadership. Note that we’re not affiliated with this organization - we just find their model very useful when discussing the topic.

1. The SAFETY model is described in depth in the book Psychological Safety: The key to happy, high-performing people and teams by Radecki and Hull, 2018 ↩

Why we should stop using spikes

Spikes were an interesting idea that have become massively abused and it’s time that we just stop using them.

Steps to improving predictability

If you have a need to know when the work will be done or how much you can do in a certain period of time then predictability will be important to you. We have great tools like Monte Carlo for probabilistic forecasting but the truth is that the forecast we generate is only as good as the data we give it. Garbage in yields garbage out. So how do we improve our data to make it inherently more predictable?

Where should a tech lead start?

I was recently talking to a developer who had just been promoted to tech lead. They were asking what they should be doing differently now. I suggested the first things I’d focus on are that their job is now…

Technical vs Architectural Debt

I was first introduced to the idea of splitting technical debt into two distinct parts during a conference talk given by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock. She talked about there being a real difference between simple cleanup such as renaming or adding clarity and architectural restructuring.

Optimizing collaboration

A manager at a past client of mine once had a new request come in. The new request would impact multiple different teams, that would all have to make changes to their individual pieces and then integrated. Because it was potentially a large change, he asked all the teams involved to come up with an estimate and they came back with a total estimate of ten to twelve weeks.

Ensemble Programming

Ensemble programming (aka “Mob Programming” or “Software Teaming”) is a technique where the entire team works together on a single story at the same time, on the same computer. It takes pair programming to the next level by including everyone.

Defects / Bugs

Surprisingly, there isn’t much agreement on what a defect is or how they should be addressed. This page explains our position on defects and how we feel they should be dealt with.