Scrum and multiple project teams

One of our customers is grappling with how to manage a scrum process that involves multiple teams with multiple responsibilities. The larger organization produces a

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When Illusion beats Reality

We often help our customers update their software development environments to more modern practices.  Sometimes this involves languages and frameworks. Other times it involves updating

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Standup isn’t about what you say, it’s about what you hear

Because of some meetings, I missed our company wide standup for 3 straight days, finally attending again yesterday afternoon. I realized how important it is, and how much I missed it. I don’t think anyone missed my contributions, but I missed hearin…

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Using existing code is right, usually

Chris Smith wrote a great post last week about the importance of other people’s hard work. In general, he’s right.  Our industry has a sad reputation of developers throwing away other work so they can do it themselves. It’s common enough to …

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Distributed Version Control is a Disruptive Change

In an earlier post, I discussed that you should decide and promote new ideas as either incremental changes, or disruptive new innovations.  If you try to describe it the wrong way, you won’t get the adoption you want, and many of your users will…

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Pairing is a tool, not a mandate

SRT Solutions is a very collaborative environment. We enable our employees to choose the best way to collaborate. There are with a minimum number of rules and processes. If you’re in the Ann Arbor area, stop by.  We’d be happy to let you see w…

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A Great Process is Continuously Evolving

I was catching up on some blog posts over the weekend, and two by Stephen Forte caught my eye. He wrote about his initial experience with Agile methodologies, and how he started breaking all the rules. That made me start thinking about our own proces…

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Agile and Beyond

The Agile and Beyond Conference was held today at the Henry Ford Conference Center in Dearborn. Marvin Toll and a dedicated group of volunteers, including

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Distributed Version Control: My reasons for using it

Distributed Version Control (DVCS) is generating lots of interest, buzz, and rhetoric. You’ve heard of Git, Mercurial (Hg), and Bzr. You’ve probably been told that all the cool kids are using it. Unfortunately, for these tools, and you, too often t…

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The Software Industry is Lost

Our industry is more than 50 years old and still trying to understand some fundamental questions. There have been many analogies and practices to describe how software should be built, yet we still do not have definitive answers to questions like "What defines good software?" and "What defines good code?" The answers people give to [...]

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