Alas, we enter a new year, a time at which many people start thinking about opportunities. This was a place I found myself, three years ago today, when I made the decision that I wanted to work for ThoughtWorks. Three years, four countries, and several really great clients later, I still feel as good about [...]
Now that Agile has passed the 10-year mark, many people are starting to wonder what the next step should be in the evolution of Agile. As we start to think about what’s next, it doesn’t hurt to think for a moment about how we got here in the first place. As the saying goes, it’s [...]
So here you are, on a project, and everything is going great. You are delivering value, your customer is happy, and all is well and right with the world. You are doing Agile – including the parts like pairing and TDD that lots of people pay lip service to but far fewer actually do. You [...]
Have you gone Agile? What are you doing this year to become Agile? We must become Agile in the next three months! These days, it is not unusual to hear about executives wanting to do an “Agile Transformation” on the entire company. Who knew that a bunch of relatively obscure techies would create a movement [...]
Many of you will remember Revenge of The Nerds, that fine classic movie where a bunch of, well, nerds take over the campus of Adams college by outsmarting and outwitting the jocks. For people who work in computers of a certain age and disposition – say, a late 30s geek from a western culture like [...]
IF one could equate faster typing with velocity, engineering practices perhaps would not matter in the world of software development productivity. Thankfully, there are reasons that most organizations do not use Words Per Minute in our evaluation process when hiring new software developers. Slamming out low quality code and claiming progress, be it story points, [...]
After nearly 20 years writing custom software, mostly for corporations in IT departments, there is nearly a uniform meme I encounter among those who sponsor projects that involve custom software development: “Custom software costs too much!” There are stories, anecdotes, studies, and all sorts of experience about how software development schedules that go over time, [...]
In my book The Nomadic Developer, I spent an entire chapter covering techniques that allow you to thrive as a technology consultant. Of course, I wrote that before I joined ThoughtWorks. Since joining, I can certainly say that ThoughtWorks has given me quite an education about technology consulting. This post explores some of the things [...]
As many long time readers know, I am an enthusiast of the F# programming language. I make no apologies for the fact that, if you are developing software on the .NET platform, F# is one of the better choices you can make for numerous reasons. It is one of the reasons I proudly contributed as [...]
You have heard this one before. They key to project success is “Upper Management Support”. I hear the phrase so much it is pretty much a cliche, right up there with “be aligned with the business”. It ranks right up there with “brush your teeth in the morning” and “exercise if you want to be [...]
