Posts for "Software"

I have a love hate relationship going on right now with ExtJS, a JavaScript application framework originally created as an open source extension to YUI and now a commercially licensed product. You'd think the relationship would be all positive, since anything that simplifies the drudgery of writing attractive browser-side code

Are your stand-ups becoming a daily chore from which you and your team gain minimal value? Do you find attendees’ attention lagging as the team reviews what they did yesterday and today? Does the daily stand-up not always make clear the critical risks and sprint status? There are many reasons

Risk management is one of many essential skills not taught in our undergraduate degrees. The adage, “good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment”, is an effective description of our on the job learning approach to managing risk. Unfortunately professional success depends upon the ability to manage

A few months back I had dinner with a group of product managers returning from Scrum training. The team had been struggling to find the right process for their organization, and hoped the additional training might identify their internal deficiencies. One of the product managers confided to me in his

Last week I interviewed an engineer with good analytics, solid software design skills, and relevant professional experience. He would have been a good potential fit for my team with one exception: his belief that he could not produce good software working more than 40 hours per week. The concept, known

My 10 year old son volunteered me to coach his FIRST LEGO League team. FIRST is a competition for elementary and middle school kids combining science and robotics. The program is modeled after team sports, and involves months of preparation followed by an intense competition. Coaching requires keeping a team

Software Muchausen By Proxy (SMBP) is a syndrome first diagnosed by me over a decade ago, and contrary to the opinion of some, represents my only contribution to the American Psychological Association. The diagnosis came while managing a small team of engineers at a software startup. After a few releases

Last Tuesday I held a CodeFest competition at Sonian. After an intense day of coding, the company gathered to watch the teams present their results. I’ll confess to being surprised by the scope of some of the ideas - ideas that required the use of natural language processing, image

Last Thursday I attended the Boston Clojure Meetup, an informal gathering of engineers co-sponsored by the two Clojure pioneers in the Boston area: cloud startup Sonian and web accelerator Akamai (via the acquisition of the Florida-based startup Velocitude). The special guest for the event was Phil Hagelberg, hacker, Clojure enthusiast,

A few years back I received a call from Stephen Denning, an Australian author best known for his books on organizational storytelling. Stephen wanted to talk with me about my work at Easel Corporation in the 1990s for his upcoming The Leader's Guide to Radical Management. Until Stephen called, I

Several years ago I went on a customer call with a sales rep who had raced crew in college. Over lunch she told me how her coach found the best racing team each year. At the beginning of the season, the coach would race prospective crew members in two boats

I once had a program manager ask me: “Are you for or against agile?” By way of context, I was taking over a large existing software team, and he wanted to ensure his role as scrum master was intact. I thought about it for a few seconds and answered him