Monthly Archives: August 2015
Reading was never something I enjoyed growing up, I lost interest too easily and never finished any books. In my late teens I started reading horror books, I enjoyed those! At one point I got through all of James Herbert’s and most of Clive Barker’s books. I’m not sure what it was about horror books especially, the suspense I guess and…ok…I enjoyed the gore too!!
When it came to technical books though I found it harder, they are not typically books you can read cover to cover, though I did give it a go! Some technical books are thick enough to take up the whole shelf on their own so a better strategy was to pick sections that interested me to study. The real value was putting it into practice, which is difficult for bedtime reading! But I got through books on Java and design patterns that turned me into… Continue reading
“Yeah, we’re doing agile. Been doing it for some time now.”
Really?
I know it’s not good to doubt straight away but I’ve developed this skepticism when people say they are doing agile. It has come from speaking with different team members and senior management about their impression of ‘agile’. For sometime now agile has become an overloaded term that many don’t fully understand. I get into a situation when someone says those words I feel like they have to prove it! But proving it, even to ourselves, can help us evaluate if we have lost sight of an original goal. It’s so easy to get immersed in the usual routine that we forget to take a moment to stop and look up.
For the most part, I believe senior management or other stakeholders actually this think agile is being done correctly and this is where the problem lies! They… Continue reading
You only have to say “big bang release” to me and it causes my blood pressure to rise. Arrrgggghhhhhh!!!! Too many bad memories! I’ve been involved my fair share of painful big bang releases to know that they should be avoided, but we get into a cycle that’s hard to break! Almost as though we become anesthetized to the pain, all passion to improve is drained from us as we’ve accepted that “this is just the way it is”.
We’re in the software business because we enjoy being part of creating something, hopefully something we think is great! This is what we want to concentrate on, the more we firefight with releases the more team moral drops and people become disengaged. Some team members have never been the same since going through a number of these! The agonizing release process has taken its toll, the hunger to work for… Continue reading
Blogging has been on my mind for many years, if I wrote all the excuses I used down it would make an impressive list! We all have personal obstacles in our lives, some we create ourselves, as managers we not only need to tackle our own but help our team to tackle theirs. Identifying them is often the biggest challenge as we often put up a self denial barrier stopping it being considered. This blog is more about my own obstacles though than others.
What could I say that would really make a difference to anyone? I certainly don’t doubt my ability as a manager, but the little voice in my head says no one will care what you think. There are managers out there with popular blogs covering everything any manager would need to know. Look at Rands in his blog, what can I say on top of… Continue reading
