Posted on

Product-Aligned Software Teams

Product-Aligned Software Teams

For a long time now, and starting in earnest in the early 1990s, people involved with software development and delivery have been shifting various aspects of the work to the “left,” if you visualize a software delivery pipeline that runs from left to right. What’s the endgame?

Continue reading Product-Aligned Software Teams

Posted on

80/20 Skills

People in our field like to cite various maxims or laws. To name a few, there are Conway’s Law, Hyrum’s Law,
Brooks’ Law, the Peter Principle, Hofstadter’s Law, the 90-90 Rule, Parkinson’s Law, Sayre’s Law, Eagleson’s Law, Postel’s Law (a.k.a. the Robustness Principle), Linus’ Law, the Dunning-Kruger Effect, the Principle of Least Astonishment, Hanlon’s Razor and it’s notable parent, Occam’s Razor, and of course the ever-popular Murphy’s Law.

I’d like to consider a couple of maxims today: the Law of Diminishing Returns and the Pareto Principle, or 80/20 Rule, in relation to the idea of multi-skilled team members on a cross-functional team.
Continue reading 80/20 Skills

Posted on

Introversion and Agile

The relative effectiveness of collaborative work over individual work for many (not all) activities has become well-enough established by now that hardly anyone questions it. No one establishes an “agile” work space in such a way as to maximize disconnected, individual work and to minimize direct communication. That would be absurd.

And yet, people are determined to defend their comfort zones. A popular way to avoid working collaboratively is to say, “I’m an introvert.” Often, this is stated flatly, with a tone of finality, as if the word “introvert” completely explains why it is impossible for the individual to collaborate with others. Obviously, an introvert has to work alone all the time. They are hard-wired that way. It’s innate. It’s an immutable trait. There are no variations or nuances. End of argument. Now I’m going to turn my back on you and put my headphones back on. Go away.

There are a couple of problems with the way people typically throw the word “introvert” around.

Continue reading Introversion and Agile

Posted on

Feature teams and vertical slices in a large corporate IT environment

The idea of a feature team that incrementally delivers vertical slices of application functionality is central to many “agile” software development organizations. A feature team possesses all the skills and resources necessary to deliver a customer-centric software feature end to end. How feasible is this model in a large corporate IT environment?
Continue reading Feature teams and vertical slices in a large corporate IT environment

Posted on 14 Comments

40% to 99% of your team’s effort is wasted (give or take a bit)

Recently I noticed a post on Twitter that referred to this article by Eric Barker. Barker, in turn, shares information he learned in a conversation with Po Bronson, an author (with Ashley Merryman) of Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing. Now, notwithstanding the word “science” in the title, this is a “pop science” book, not a science book. It’s based in part on the authors’ “research” (reading statistical studies and so forth) and in part on popular assumptions – what we might call “leprechauns” or “urban legends.”.

The article rubbed me the wrong way, so I’m going to indulge myself with a bit of a rant.

Continue reading 40% to 99% of your team’s effort is wasted (give or take a bit)

Posted on 7 Comments

Does remote work work?

First, here’s the short version for those poor souls suffering from tl;dr (too lazy, don’t read much) syndrome, that peculiar malaise that characterizes our times:

Can working from home be effective
compared with collocated teams?
Opponents are quick with invective
and full of opinions, it seems.

But what if we increased, in some way,
the ratio of signal to noise?
Could we discover a good way to
routinely deliver with poise?

And now to business.

One of the ongoing debates in the IT world over the past few years has been about the relative merits of team collocation, including intense collaboration, paired work, and continuous osmotic communication, versus solo work, including work from home and other forms of remote work as well as office spaces fitted with individual cubicles. Continue reading Does remote work work?