When the Going Gets Tough
In many sectors, 2008 has been a tough year. There are very few people that expect that 2009 will be much better, and most indications are that the foreseeable future will be at least as challenging, if not worse. How people and organizations deal with these difficult times is a strong indicator of how well off they will be as the situation improves – or whether they are still around at all. Read more
Pair Everything, To a Point
Pair programming is one of the agile practices that has most polarized people on both sides of the fence: sitting two people down at the same screen and keyboard to develop a piece of code. Having experienced this practice over 25 years ago and finding it to be extremely productive, I’m in favor of it being applied more than it is now. In fact, I would advocate pairing up (or more) for almost any practice we apply in the process of building our products. Read more
Agile Too Early
Almost everyone is familiar with Dr. Bruce Tuckman’s team model of Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing. This describes a sequence of stages that teams will naturally go through, whether this is consciously managed or not. Some teams never quite make it past Storming, and some seem to get through it relatively unscathed, only to lapse back later. As with many models, teams often exhibit traits of more than one of these stages at the same time, so its linear presentation may be a bit misleading. That stated, though, the model is a succinct and extremely applicable way of describing overall team growth. If we tie this model to a couple of others, though, we get a few more very interesting insights. Read more
The Down Side of Good Tools
Often, out of the sea of different opinions of how things should be done, there rises a few techniques that make it to the level of becoming a standard way of doing things. They can be codified in a Body of Knowledge, if such a thing exists for that discipline, or become generally accepted as a ‘best practice’, though we all know that these things are quite rare. Even when they are raised to that level, there is danger that they can become overused: while every technique has it’s niche, no technique should be used too broadly. Such is the case with Work Breakdown Structures and Gantt charts. Read more
