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The Impact of Staffing Practices on Software Quality and Productivity

A Junior-Heavy Organization Companies tend to staff various teams with an experience level of employees that have a very junior heavy bias. That is, for every person with senior level experience in the organization, there tend to be multiple mid level...

Published Sun, Jun 06 2009 7:59 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Philosophy of Software, Management, Quality

Why “No Issues” Is Not An Acceptable Answer

Many of the software development teams at my company now practice the daily standup from Scrum project management . There’s a lot of great value in these meetings, even if a team is not practicing anything else from Scrum. The Anti-Pattern Several months...

Published Tue, Mar 03 2009 4:54 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Principles and Patterns, Agile, Retrospectives, Management, Lean Systems, Education, Daily Standups

The Emergence Of Knowledge In Software Development

At this point in my career, I’m convinced that software development is an empirical process . That is, we cannot predict the exact shape, size, complexity, … or any of a number of other properties … of the software that we set out to write. We can, however...

Published Mon, Mar 03 2009 2:54 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Principles and Patterns, Philosophy of Software, Management, Lean Systems, Education

It’s All About The Benjamins, Baby.

Puff Daddy got it right . No, I don’t mean having money and wealth. Never mind the actual lyrical content or intentions of those lyrics in this song. The title alone tells us everything we need to know about justifying anything in business – including...

Published Fri, Mar 03 2009 2:59 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Philosophy of Software, Management, Lean Systems, Throughput

Quality Must Be Built In – It Cannot Be Added On

Quality must be built in, it cannot be added on. … well, ok. I’ll admit that it’s not entirely true. If you don’t mind spending exorbitant amounts of money doing rework, causing projects to be late and over budget, and possibly losing the business, then...

Published Thu, Feb 02 2009 10:58 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Philosophy of Software, Management, Quality

“One Team, One Aim”. It’s All About The Journey, Not The Goal

I heard the phrase “one team, one aim” while listening to the audio book version of “ Extreme Toyota ”. This is a phrase that marks part of the core philosophies of Toyota, according to the book. There are many different philosophies that underlie this...

Published Fri, Feb 02 2009 9:00 AM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Philosophy of Software, Management, Lean Systems

Favor Defect Prevention Over Quality Inspection And Correction

In the manufacturing world, you would never find a company that assembles a bunch of parts into a final product before inspecting any of the individual parts, and they would not wait until the end of the assembly line to test for the quality of the product...

Published Fri, Jan 01 2009 10:04 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Refactoring, Analysis and Design, Agile, Philosophy of Software, Standardized Work, Management, Lean Systems, Behavior Driven Development

On The ‘Success’ Of A Project

I recently saw this question asked and answered in an after-project retrospective paper. Was The Project A Technical Success? While I am not trying to address who asked the question or what the answer was, the question on it’s on own, is flawed in my...

Published Wed, Jan 01 2009 4:52 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Philosophy of Software, Retrospectives, Management

Management vs Leadership

Manage up. Lead out and down. You ARE A Manager If you work FOR anyone, in any context, you’re a manager. You mange your boss’ expectations of when you will have something completed. You manage your customer’s expectations of what the software will look...

Published Fri, Jan 01 2009 8:56 AM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Management

Improving Our Industry: Its Time to Educate Outward, to Improve Inward

For so long there have been so many advocating the benefits of the various Agile, Lean, Iterative, or whatever-you-want-to-call-it-these-days methodologies. We, as software developers, seem to understand the benefits of these methods. So why, then, do...

Published Tue, Jan 01 2009 11:59 AM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Community, Agile, Philosophy of Software, Management, Lean Systems

The Pathfinder: Reaching Your Organization’s Goal

Imagine that there are three group of people going out for a hike. Within each group of people, we have a goal of everyone reaching a picnic table at the end of the hike (and no one can eat until everyone has arrived). One of the people in each group...

Published Mon, Jan 01 2009 1:41 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Community, Agile, Philosophy of Software, Management, Lean Systems

My soap box… no, really…

My coworkers really do love me. This was their Christmas present for me, complete with shiny bow. I was told to use it only for good, not for evil. And yes, that is me preaching from my soap box. :)

Published Fri, Dec 12 2008 10:23 AM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Community, Management

Kanban in Software Development. Part 3: Andon and Jidoka - Handling Bugs and Emergency Fixes in Kanban

Let's assume that we are doing the appropriate amount of testing during our development process. If we include TDD, test automation, test engineers and customer acceptance testing, we should find the majority of the bugs in our system before they...

Published Fri, Dec 12 2008 8:46 AM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Community, Analysis and Design, Principles and Patterns, Philosophy of Software, Management, Lean Systems, Continuous Integration, Kanban

Kanban in Software Development. Part 2.5: A Variation on Queues - Pipelines for WIP and Done

In part 2 of my Kanban in Software Development series, I talked about completing a kanban board with queues, order points and limits. We saw how to take a complete development pipeline and work with a team, its processes and its bottlenecks. In the end...

Published Mon, Dec 12 2008 12:07 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Analysis and Design, Agile, Management, Lean Systems, Kanban

Kanban in Software Development. Part 2: Completing the Kanban Board with Queues, Order Points and Limits

In Part 1 of Kanban in Software Development , I introduced the concepts of kanban boards and pipelines. I also showed a very simple example of creating a pipeline for our development process. However, there were some obvious limitations in what I showed...

Published Mon, Dec 12 2008 2:06 PM by derick.bailey

Filed under: Agile, Philosophy of Software, Retrospectives, Management, Lean Systems, Kanban

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