Improve your greatest asset You may have heard this tale before: Once a woodcutter strained to saw down a tree. A young human who was watching asked “Whatcha doing?” “Are you blind?” the woodcutter replied. “I’m cutting down this tree.” The observer was unabashed. “You look exhausted! Take a break. …
Bring up the topic of “technical debt” to a software engineer, a product owner, a stakeholder, or heavens above, the gold owner. What happens? Do you get frowns? Smiles? Nervous fidgeting? Technical Debt is such a loaded, misused, and misunderstood term. I imagine in most conversations when the topic comes up we probably aren’t even …
Try this experiment: Give your teams time and space to play.
That’s it. Don’t expect something shippable. Don’t plan to judge their output on the basis of business value. There will be no “right or wrong.” There will be no award for “the best idea.”
One of the 12 principles behind the Manifesto for Agile Software Develop is: At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly. This adjustment of behavior can take many forms: from stopping a practice that is not fruitful to simply doing more or less …
While a team can rollback a code push that didn’t go well, refactor a feature that didn’t hit the mark, the one thing they can never recover is lost time. Use this retrospective technique to expose the thieves of time pestering your team,
