Systems 1 & 2: how your brain actually makes decisions
In his seminal book Thinking Fast and Slow1, Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman talks about two very different kinds of thinking that we do. He refers to them as System 1 (fast, but often wrong) and System 2 (slower, more accurate).
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Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman ↩
Code comments
Research shows that code comments rarely stay in sync with the code they’re describing. Other psychology research shows that incorrect comments are worse than no comments at all. Should we get rid of code comments entirely or are some worth keeping around?
The Perils of Why: Four Reasons to Avoid ‘Why’ Questions in Coaching
In a coaching context, asking “why” questions can be problematic. They can often give results that we did not intend and should be used carefully and sparingly.
Learning from the past
Many years ago, I came in one morning to a client, to discover the website down and the email server completely unresponsive. Naturally, we assumed that we we’d been hacked. What else could take down two unrelated systems at the same time?
Per-story estimates
Per-story estimates were an interesting experiment that failed and it’s time to move on. Today, we have better ways so it’s time to stop putting individual estimates on stories. This is equally true for Scrum and Kanban teams.
What is a Service Level Expectation?
A service level expectation is a probabilistic forecast of how long it will take a single item to pass through the system. For example: “85% chance of completing in four days or less”.
A developers job
This week I heard “A developers job is to write great software” and I disagree. A developers job is to solve problems for their clients. We have a tendency to get so focused on specific skillsets like “I write code” that we miss the entire point of why we’re doing it.
Kanban: Simple, but not always obvious
We meet a lot of teams who say they’re doing Kanban and yet are only scratching the surface and not getting the benefit from Kanban that they could. They’re moving some cards across a board and think that’s all they have to do. Because it appears so simple, it doesn’t occur to them to reach out for assistance. Why would I need training or coaching to move some tickets around?
Rebuild vs Refactor
I was recently talking to someone who had an old codebase that they just couldn’t work with anymore. So they rewrote it from scratch and within six months, the new code was just as bad as the old. They were no further ahead, despite having invested a significant amount of time and money. This is a common story and it doesn’t have to be this way.
Logical Levels: why coaching at the wrong level doesn’t work
Robert Dilts’ Logical Levels Model (also called Neurological Levels), is a framework to analyze and understand human experiences, behaviours, and change. It provides a structured way of examining different levels of human experience and helps individuals identify and work with those levels to create effective change. It’s based on earlier work from anthropologist Gregory Bateson.