Organisations often introduce Best Practices as part of a change program or quality initiative. These can take a number of forms, from “cook books” and cheat sheets to full-blown consultant-led methodologies, complete with the requisite auditing and accreditation.
This article introduces the Dreyfus learning model to challenge the strategy of naively applying Best Practices, and shows how they can not only fail to help, but even have a severe negative impact on your top performers.
Most of my work these days is helping organisations figure out how to be more effective, in terms of how quickly they can identify and respond to the needs of their external and internal customers, and how well their response meets those needs. This tends to be easy enough in the small; the challenges appear as we try to scale these techniques to the hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of people.
Over the last year or two I have been exploring OKRs—Objectives and Key Results—with several organisations, from a few hundred people in size to a couple of thousand. Some are well over a year in, some are just starting out. There doesn’t seem to be much out there in terms of experience reports or hands-on advice so I have tried to capture the advice I wish I’d had when I started out.
I like JUnit. It is simple and clean, and it is ubiquitous in the Java world.
I like Go’s testing package. It is even simpler and cleaner, and distinguishes between failed checks and fatal test failures. It doesn’t use exceptions to do this.
I wanted to see what Go’s testing semantics would look like in JUnit, so I wrote JGoTesting. Some people helped me.
I’m quite pleased with how it is turning out so I want to share it with you.
Modern Scrum is a certification-laden minefield of detailed practises and roles. To legitimately describe oneself as a Scrum Master or Product Owner involves an expensive two day certification class taught by someone who in turn took an eye-wateringly expensive Scrum Trainer class, from one of the competing factions of “Professional” or “Certified” (but ironically not both) schools of Scrum training. But it was not always so.
tl;dr: Thank you to some lovely people for translating or graphic recording some of my work.
One of the nicest compliments you can receive as a writer is someone choosing to translate your work to make it available to a new audience. I am enormously grateful to the people who have translated my articles and blog posts over the years, most recently Julia Kadauke, who translated What’s In A Storyinto German.
My first job was playing Star Wars for a living. True story! I had a student internship in 1988 with a games company called Domark. They published the 8-bit versions of movie and board game tie-ins like Star Wars and Trivial Pursuit on home computers like the ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64. If someone called and said they had found a glitch on level 8 of The Empire Strikes Back, I needed to know what they were talking about.
I am excited to announce some public dates for my Testing Faster and Software Faster classes. These include the first 2-day classes this year, and the first ever public dates for London.
Software Faster masterclass
Software Faster is for people looking beyond Scrum and the other agile methods that have been around since the mid–1990s. These methods can shrink delivery times from years to months, but then what? You want to deliver in weeks, days or even hours. The last two decades have seen amazing technological advances, in languages, tools, techniques, and in the availability of inexpensive, on-demand infrastructure. What use is a two-week planning horizon if you can build, deploy, test and discard several product ideas in a single morning?
Someone asked me recently for advice about consulting into multiple teams, in particular about how to make the most effective use of a number of short sessions. He will be spending two hours with each team in each visit. This will be an ongoing relationship, with a series of visits made up of these two hour coaching sessions.
Some software teams get stuck because their business users don’t realise they need to make time to take delivery of features they’ve requested. Over time their User Acceptance Testing backlog increases to the point where the team’s throughput virtually stalls.
I’ve been taking a few weeks of semi-vacation in South Africa and I’m in a reflective mood, so please forgive the indulgent tone of this post. I’ve been thinking about what an awesome industry I work in, and some of the people who have been moving it forward over the last few years, at least for me. I wanted to take a moment to appreciate them. If you haven’t come across any of the following topics I encourage you to explore further. At the very least you should be following these folks on Twitter.
I’m having fun in the most unlikely of places. I’m currently working at a Big American Bank. In fact, it’s so big it’s called Bank of America. I recently wrote an article for their internal agile magazine which probably best describes why I think it’s so much fun, and which I’ve reproduced below.