Have you ever been on a really good software team? There’s this feeling of connectedness, of shared purpose. We know what we’re building, and we are skilled at building it together. This kind of team can grow some amazing software. When we work at making our team great like this, we look for new ways …
Read moreSoftware development pushes us to get better as people
At my first real job, around the turn of the millenium, software engineers were graded on a bell curve. On a scale of 1 to 5, most people should get 3s, with a lower number of 4s and 2s and a much lower number of 1s and 5s. The bell curve, also called the normal …
TL;DR: Projects ask teams do what is asked of them; Products ask teams to invent their work. This requires a different way of seeing the world, and not everyone can do it yet. Software is not an up-front investment that pays off over its use. Software is an ongoing concern, an intricate piece of a …
Read moreProject to Product asks more of our software, and more of us
Here’s my keynote for 2021, a sequel to Camerata. Follow this link to the video, abstract, and references over at: systemsthinking.dev.
No one wants to review pull requests. This is a sign of a deeper problem than “people aren’t following the process”
Why dig into problems that you could work around? Three reasons: one about my work, one about the team, and one about me.
Say you’re aiming for outcome-based product teams that write and operate software. Maybe you hire for roles in these teams like Software Developer, Product Owner, Designer, Tester. How do you define each role? We usually ask, what does each person do? A typical job description includes: what does the person do? What are they responsible …
Read moreDefine roles by what each person increasingly knows
https://changelog.com/podcast/398 Looks like I talked about “Understanding software systems, transferring knowledge between devs, building relationships, using VS Code & Docker to code together, observability as a logical extension of TDD, and a whole lot more.”
Lately I’ve been working in Node, and that means I have access to all the open-source modules on npm. It is easy to add a dependency on any of them. But is it a good idea? Not every library is production-grade. Not every library (or service) is something that I want my production code to depend …
(This is a shorter version of my talk for DeliveryConf, January 2020. Video of slides+audio; Slides as pdf) Good software is still alive. The other day, I asked my twelve year old daughter for recommendations of drawing programs. She told me about one (FireAlpaca?) “It’s free, and it updates pretty often.” She contrasted that with …