The extreme in eXtreme Programming (XP)
My first exposure to anything Agile was with eXtreme Programming (XP) back in 1999. While it had many process steps similar to what Scrum and Kanban offer today, the thing that really differentiated XP was it’s focus on technical practices. It’s those technical practices that we are usually referring to when we talk about XP today.
A tale of two teams
I was asked about two teams recently. They worked on the same product, did very similar work, and had similar team composition (team size, skills, etc), yet one of them was noticeably outperforming the other. The company wanted to understand why this was happening and how they could make it better.
What work to select for an ensemble
When I facilitate an ensemble session (also called Mob Programming) with a team, I’m often asked what work we should pick to work on. The answer is really whatever we would have done this week anyway.
Thinking we want more documentation
It’s quite common when we reflect on problems that someone will say “we just need better documentation”, and everyone will nod their heads. Yet we rarely ask the question “if we wrote better documentation, would anyone actually read it?”
Book: Shatter the Hero Culture
Hero culture is a situation where one person, or a small number of people, take on the majority of the work, and others start to step back. If you hear things like “these people don’t pull their weight and I have to do everything for them”, you may not have lazy people at all. You may have the effects of hero culture destroying the teamwork that you should have.
Optimizing for our own effectiveness
One of the mistakes we make is assuming that people will make logical and rational decisions to optimize for the perfect overall outcome. People do make decisions that seem logical to them, however they do so within their own context. They do what’s right for them, not what’s optimal for the overall situation.
Risk Management
Yesterday I went on a guided hike to teach people how to safely hike through bear country. Specifically grizzy bear country. Unfortunately, we didn’t see any bears, but we did learn an amazing amount about them, and saw some spectacular glaciers and alpine terrain.
Gaming metrics
When I suggest that people will game whatever metrics we put in place, I’m often met with shocked indignation. We would never game the numbers! And yet we do.
OKR’s for Quality
The topic of OKR’s for quality have come up in multiple different contexts, across multiple clients, recently so perhaps it’s worth exploring.
Jira Metrics 2.12
I’ve released JiraMetrics 2.12, with a number of bug fixes, and a new chart that I’ll describe below.