How much are you able to learn on your own? For some people, reading books, articles, and going to certain training courses are all they need to keep steadily growing their skillset. For teams however, things are a bit more challenging. Retrospectives are indeed a great help, but these are still from the team’s own […]
Three Software Engineering Coaches Get Coached By GeePaw Hill (FourScouts TV) Read More »
I’m long past on record that I think the use of auto-mockers outside of legacy rescue situations is bad policy. First, it’s easy to write "psuedo-tests" using an automocker. Psuedo-tests are tests that appear to prove things about your code that they don’t actually prove. Now, note, I’m not saying auto-mockers force one to write
On (Not) Using Mocking Frameworks Read More »
A respondent asked that I combine these three short Pro-Tip muses into one post, so here goes: Coaching Pro-Tip #1: Everything good about agility is rooted in relationship, so everything good about coaching is, too. As coaches, we usually start from negative trust, and our central priority has to be reversing that position. In the
Three Short Coaching Pro-Tips Read More »
Two recurring phrases in my work are 1) It is like this because we built it to be like this. 2) The code works for you, you don’t work for the code. Two sides of one page, phrased on the front as negative critique, and on the verso as positive encouragement. Before we dig in,
Two Mantras, One Theme Read More »
"Path-focused design", of stories, architecture, code, is design that understands that we can only reach a distant City on the Hill by taking one stride-limited shipping step at a time. Sunday muse-day, comfort food for the geek in me and in you, but please remember, we don’t really just want to change code, we want
Path-Focused Design Read More »
Big-batch releases, coordinated and controlled by a central intelligence, fail, and fail frequently. Several aspects of this are fascinating, because of the interplay of hard mathematical reality with human frailty. Let’s take a swing. It’s Sunday muse-day, comfort food for the geekery-inclined. Enjoy, take respite, but don’t forget we want to change a lot more
Big Batch Releases Read More »
You can put all your configuration in a shared library and eliminate just about every mis-configuration in your multi-process application. It’s not free, but it’s cheap, and it kills a lot of minor pain. Let’s take a gander. It’s Sunday geek comfort-food time. I hope you enjoy it, and I also hope you remember it’s
Sharing Configurations Read More »
When large teams struggle with trunk-based development (TBD) or continuous integration/deployment (CI/CD), a good strategy is to re-orient how the teams face "backsteps", moments in our workflow where a discovery forces us to re-open a stage we thought was closed. It’s been a hard stretch for those of us seeking peace and equity. I offer
Re-Orienting Around Backsteps Read More »
A couple of days back, I tweeted about SAFe. It created some stir on the timeline, which was great, as I got to see a lot of perspectives. I want to use that tweet as an excuse to talk about something much larger. This will be a long one. 🙂 Meanwhile, I remind you, geekery’s
The standup is a short recurring meeting used to (re-)focus the team-mind on effectively moving stories through our workflow. Here’s my recommended approach to having standups be useful and brief. The general sequence is 1) address team-wide emergency issues, 2) work story-by-story, 3) distribute new work, 4) address team-wide non-emergency issues. Note that, quite often,
